Free Comic Book Day 2022 At Double Midnight Comics
Twenty years ago, the largest distributor of comics books from publishers to stores, Diamond Comic Distributors, launched Free Comic Book Day as a way to encourage people to shop at those stores. Since then, every first Saturday in May, comic book retailers have set up what amounts to mini conventions, adding artists alleys, costume contests and sometimes even celebrity guests to tables full of free comics.
The pandemic, of course, threw a curve ball at Free Comic Book Day just like it did with any gathering from birthday parties to huge conventions like the recently canceled E3 2022. So, I was very excited to see that most comic book stores around me decided to ramp up the activity at their stores to nearly the same levels as 2019, before everything shut down. For me, that meant coming back to Double Midnight Comics in Manchester, NH.
As in years past, the line to get in to DMC as soon as it opened at 10 a.m. stretched from the front door of the store — the second-to-last store in the short leg of the plaza it is in — down the short leg of the L, then down the long leg of the L and eventually down the sidewalk out of sight of the store itself. In fact, the first people to get in line did so Wednesday evening, for an event that wouldn’t get under weigh until Saturday morning.
With all that excitement, I hoped that the number of cosplayers would be similar to pre-pandemic times. While that number was way higher than last year, when DMC held the first in-person FCBD since 2019, it was about two-thirds of the average from the five years prior to the pandemic.
Taking into account all those returning shoppers and cosplayers, and since the covid-19 infection rates were spiking once again in the Northeast, I was masked the whole time. As I told some people on Saturday, while I am sure I am going to inevitably catch covid-19, in light of how the variants keep getting less dangerous while becoming more infectious, my plan is hold out until the variant I catch will be impossible to tell between covid-19 and a bad day of allergies. Wish me luck.
Cosplayers in this gallery of images from Free Comic Book Day 2022 include rangerpoolcosplay, christopherlavallee, Powers Family CozPlay, Zombie Leader, aestheticworkhorse, AkaneSaotome, BNH Photography, aceofsnakes, doompool87, and more.
We now use Smugmug to present cosplay photo galleries and will post all photos there, with a link to each gallery in its own gallery article. This will allow us to give you higher resolution images to download — still for free.
To view the entire gallery, just click on the image below. If you are pictured in any of our galleries, feel free to download the images and use them non-commercially on social media, with appropriate credit.
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