That time of year has come and gone again! Saturday, May 3rd was the 24nd Free Comic Book Day, that annual celebration when comic shops nationwide offer no-strings-attached goodies as a form of community outreach in honor of that time-honored medium where words and pictures dance in unison on the printed page, whether in the form of super-heroes, monsters, cartoon all-stars, licensed merchandise, or in rare instances real-world protagonists. It’s one of the best holidays ever for hobbyists like me who’ve been comics readers since the days when drugstores sold them for thirty-five cents each and comic book movies were shoddier than actual B-movies.

Each year comic shops lure fans and curious onlookers inside their brick-and-mortar hideaways with a big batch of free new comics from all the major publishers and a bevy of smaller competitors deserving shelf space and consideration. I observe the holiday by getting up early, venturing to one or more comic shops as soon as they open for their occasion, picking up samples, and spending money on a few extra items as my way of thanking each shop for their service in the field of literacy.

For the first time since 2019, I took advantage of a special offer from Indianapolis’ own Downtown Comics: a charity bundle option, for which they requested donations of a certain size in exchange for copies of all 45 of this year’s FCBD offerings. This year’s charity was the Dayspring Center, a homeless assistance center in downtown Indy. I was happy to help, though 45 comics took a lot of time to read from top to bottom, from best to worst.

In the spirit of my personal tradition, I also stopped at Comic Carnival, Indy’s oldest comic shop, which I’d visit more often if I lived anywhere near Indy’s north side. They keep a deep bench of uncommoner obscurities and locally published works, and had a few items on their shelves that my weekly shop doesn’t. I wish I’d had time and funding and storage space for still more comics shopping that day, as our city has more than its share of funnybook retailers, but my reading pile has already regenerated and overgrown its capacity here in the post-pandemic years.

Unlike some years past, I’m not posting capsule reviews of every FCBD comic because no one’s got time for that, least of all me. I dunno about you, but May is always our family’s most hectic month, and it doesn’t help that everyone’s FCBD interest window is by now closed and locked, never to be reopened till next year.

Regardless: of those 45 freebies, the following seven were Top of the Pops in my opinion:

Hulk Teach (Graphix/Scholastic Inc.): From Jeffrey Brown, the award-winning cartoonist behind the Darth Vader and Son series and other works I now regret missing, comes a surprisingly accurate distillation of the Jade Giant’s origin and early days, only to corkscrew into a new alt-timeline in which Puny Banner plea-bargains away his countless rampages in exchange for community service of the most brutal sort: teaching middle school. Brown clearly knows his gamma-canon, and never have I laughed harder at military tool Glenn Talbot than I did here.

Thundercats/The Powerpuff Girls (Dynamite): Half the FCBD stack was nostalgic IP-perpetuation machines, but faithfully hilarious renditions of Blossom, Bubbles and Buttercup (who used to be big in our household) trapped in a silly crossover hit my sweet spot. Our Heroines fall through a wormhole to planet Thundera, find themselves powerless and try making the best use of their random surroundings. My Thundercats opinions vary wildly from one take to the next, but Paulina Ganucheau and Coleman Engle smartly let us tour it through the young super-ladies’ eyes and their meet-up with local hero Panthro, whom an unimpressed Buttercup describes as “the invisible sidekick man cat.”

Fantastic Four (Marvel): Yes, there’s a pattern to my preferences this year: all the most fun books rose to the top. Marvel’s First Family are already my favorite ongoing Marvel series of the moment thanks to Unbeatable Squirrel Girl co-conspirator Ryan North, who’s favored short arcs and single-issue tales throughout his run and demonstrated the widest knowledge of Actual Science by an FF writer since maybe Dwayne McDuffie, which is an absolute must to get them right. As a compromise readers have had to accept Johnny Storm’s tragic mustache, which is on full display in this likewise done-in-one tale of an ill-conceived summoning circle iiin spaaace!

(There’s also an X-Men backup that’s a prologue to the upcoming Giant-Size X-Men time-travel event, which introduces its central character and flashes back to the X-Men #94 days when — evergreen reminder — Cyclops is a big fat jerk. Some things will never be retconned away.)

Creaky Acres (Kokila/Penguin Random House): A young Black girl named Nora suffers the heartbreak of moving away from her friends to another faraway town, where fish-out-of-water angst will surely come into play. One added wrinkle: she’s a budding equestrienne whose family owns a horse, which they’ll have to move to a different stable with different instructors and probably different rules and methods and everything. Once I got past my own initial knee-jerk poor-kid reaction (how bad can things be, right? They can AFFORD A HORSE), I enjoyed the universal theme of Change Can Feel Awful But It Gets Better, and have to admit “A Girl and Her Horse” sounds like a lode of storytelling potential for the right reading demos. With a focus on dressage and some pages of actual horse care lessons, it’s an amiably fresh start from children’s author Calista Brill and animator Nilah Magruder (whose work has graced a few Marvel projects, including co-creating Spider-Byte, Amandla Stenberg’s character in Across the Spider-Verse).

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar: Champion (Ten Speed Graphic/Penguin Random House): The oft-quoted Substack columnist, Airplane! costar, and [checks notes] world-famous basketball player coauthors his first graphic novel, along with novelist/producer Raymond Obstfeld (the Executioner books, Veronica Mars season 4) and illustrator Ed Laroche. The main story follows a teen B-ball star wannabe named Monk who gets himself into stupid trouble and as penance gets assigned to make a presentation for his classmates about his biggest hero, whose identity you can guess…but Coach lays down a tough condition: he can’t include anything about his basketball career. Anyone who’s been online enough can guess where else this is going, and if the words “social justice” make your skin crawl, I can’t help you, but my dude, it’s KAREEM. What’s here so far aims for inspiration with a sharp wit, but the major lessons to come are all about what else he did with his life during all these decades off the court.

Dr. Seuss Graphic Novels (RH Graphic): The esteemed Mr. Geisel was such a formative influence on my preschool years that I should want to burn everything about these posthumous sequels down to the ground. (See: every Peanuts publication not by Charles Schulz himself.) The publishers wisely sidestepped his unique poetic side and recruited top-flight purveyors such as James Kochalka and Art Baltazar to recapture some of that otherdimensional whimsy in their own distinctive styles. No, it still isn’t the same; nor is it hollow, get-rich blasphemy. I was amused and guilt-free.

Will Eisner: A Comics Biography (NBM): “The creator of The Spirit” is a logline that barely touches his scope and significance as a groundbreaking writer/artist, as a studio head, as a champion for creators’ rights, and as one of America’s earliest and foremost dedicated graphic novelists. (Without Eisner there’d be no Spiegelman’s Maus, among countless others.) Eisner is long overdue for a comics bio on the shelf next to his own autobio works, at last realized by historian/analyst Stephen Weiner and artist Dan Mazur, whose pages keep to their own style while also echoing Eisner’s later works, dispelling my long-held fear that no one else in the universe besides me has pored over Comics and Sequential Art, which should be required reading for anyone actively in the medium (along with The Spirit, natch.)

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Free bonus takes from The Department of Honorable Mentions:

* Bad Kitty (Roaring Brook Press): Funny-animal antics in the modern age, frequently chuckle-worthy but in dire need of professional lettering.

* Snow Monkey/Enigmatown/Something Beyond the Petrichor (Red 5 Comics): Thumbs-up to the lead tale’s revival of ’80s-style martial-arts fight scenes; and to Alex DeLuca’s delicate pastel poetry about navigating a wasteland with an imaginary talking turtle.

* Post Malone’s Big Rig #0 (Vault Comics): I’ve zero interest in celebs executive-producing vanity projects for comics-cred, and there’re better trucker-horror books out there (Nocturne, Devil’s Highway), but Nathan Gooden’s black-and-white art is so beautifully horrifying that I’m irked I’d never heard of him. Turns out he co-founded the company, whose works never show up at my local shop. Huh.

Archie’s Comics Spectacular (Archie Comics, duh): The immortal hapless teen and his unconditional pals go pop-culture riffing at random levels of relevance (the Barbie movie! Indiana Jones! dating apps! the Brady Bunch tiki idol!). The standouts include a Deadpool pastiche that mocks Archie’s own multiverse (Cosmo the Merry Martian is back, baby!) and, speaking of obscurity, a Dr. Masters four-pager composed almost entirely of homages to memes so famous that even I recognize them and sometimes still use a couple of ’em, which by definition means they’re played out and should be retired from the internet. Sorry, Question Hound, I don’t make the rules.

I Hate Fairyland (Image Comics): I’m too finicky about which cutesy homicidal maniacs I’ll follow (Milk & Cheese remains the epitome) and never quite warmed up to Skottie Young’s hyperviolent fantasy-realm anti-Heidi, but this handy X-Men #138-style recap succinctly relives some of her kills and catches up new readers in time for the imminent release of this month’s legacy-renumbered #41, where blood will presumably flow once more in her storybook massacres.

Issak (Kodansha): Skip the cover story’s attempted-rape action-drama and brake instead for the other feature, Tower Dungeon. Dungeons & Dragons meets The Raid as an intrepid party works their way up every level of an evil wizard’s medieval skyscraper (this excerpt joins them in progress on 60) with a plethora of nasty surprises and Mike-Mignola styled visuals by Tsutomo Nihei.

Kagurabachi (Viz Media): A scar-faced youngster with a magical sword takes on a form of Yakuza who’ve taken public-execution lessons from Mexican cartels. Blood splatters and criminals choke as katanas slice action-lines through pages! All this might be de rigueur in today’s manga, but it’s definitely a far cry from that time I read the first twelve issues of Shonen Jump.

Conan: Scourge of the Serpent (Titan Comics) Jim Zub’s third annual FCBD tale of everyone’s favorite barbarian (sorry, Thundarr) sets the stage for a forthcoming time-warping crossover event between three Robert E. Howard protagonists — Conan, Kull’s pal Brule the Spear-Slayer, and Professor John Kirowan, from Howard’s own Cthulhu-verse stories. Because every IP gets its own multiverse now, as we just learned from Archie’s Deadpool parody a few paragraphs ago. I rarely buy Conan comics, but I’ve yet to read a bad one, this lavishly drawn prologue included.

Best of 2000 AD (Rebellion): I also rarely buy Judge Dredd comics, and I have seen some clunkers. After a John Wagner/Jock quickie that ends with a sad-trombone joke, A Rogue Trooper short by Peter Milligan and Jose Ortiz delivers the future-wartime goods; Ian Edginton and D’Israeli return to Scarlet Traces, their War of the Worlds sequel that I didn’t realize had stuck around so long; and Alex De Campi and Silvia Califano pit Judge Anderson against an astral foe with creepy results.

Blood Type (Oni Press): I’ve enjoyed some of the indie publisher’s EC Comics revival titles, of which three shorts are reprinted here. I’d already red two of them, including the lead story that has its own spinoff coming soon, about a carefree vampire on the run who just wants to feed, if only humans would stop bugging her. But I hadn’t read “The Champion” by Matt Kindt and Kano, a Gladiator-in-space lament that pulls off a clever POV inversion with a surprising note of aching tragedy.

BOOM! Studios 20th Anniversary Special (BOOM! Studios, duh): How time has flown! Five samples across their entire publishing history to date, of which I’d already read three, though I’d implore you to check out the contemplative philosophantasy The Many Deaths of Laila Starr by Ram V and Filipe Andrade, who recently reunited on DC’s New Gods comeback. Of the other two, the best is a 2022 Mouse Guard short I’d never read, which reminds me why I used to follow the series, but not why I lost track. It’s mice with tiny swords! Which they actually use! What’s not to like?

Godzilla: The New Heroes (IDW Publishing): The formerly indie publisher continues their onslaught of titles devoted to the King of the Monsters, which I can take or leave on the printed page. Of the three different projects here, the best bits include Tim Seeley bringing back onetime MST3K guest-star Jet Jaguar and making him even dumber, and some potentially ordinary mech-team faux-manga except the mech in question is a hijacked Mechagodzilla.

The Phantom (Mad Cave Studios): The Ghost Who Walks! The original costumed animal rights activist! The comic-strip hero who inexplicably gets rebooted in comic-book format every 10-15 years! Apart from DC’s ’80s revival by Peter David (R.I.P.) and Luke McDonnell, he’s never held my interest, though this version by Ray Fawkes and Russell Olson is a solid, done-in-one jungle adventure that captures all the usual motifs with sincerity and a couple surprising flourishes, without the tedium he emanated when I was a wee lad whose family had a newspaper subscription. Ah, memories.

Star Wars (Marvel): Come celebrate ten years of the House of Ideas’ reign as funnybook rights-holder for that far-faraway galaxy! Anne and I gave up on pretty much the entire line a few years back, but you feel free to celebrate! Good to know they’re finally moving past Return of the Jedi and overwriting the Expanded Universe harder than ever, but this brief glimpse of Luke’s Further Adventures Version 2.0 (with the same old stiff figures by Marvel’s favorite SW artist) gives me no reason to return to the fold. Ditto the backup tale with Qui-Gon and Teen Padawan Obi-Wan, concerning a prophecy we already know is false. The middle tale is a gem, though: Charles Soule and Steffano Raffaele get to know Vaneé, the forgotten butler at Vader’s castle on Mustafar. To me the universe’s unexplored books can be way more fascinating than watching the big-name heroes tread narrative water.

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…and that’ll have to do. If anyone wants to hear what bugged or bored me about the other 24 comics, by all means whisper in the comments. Otherwise, Lord willing, we’ll see you next Free Comic Book Day!