Today is Free Comic Book Day!

Free Comic Book Day is an annual event sponsored by Diamond Distributors to encourage new people to walk into their local comic book shops. Both Marvel and DC will be filling stores with multiple titles. Other publishers, such as Image and Dark Horse, will also be providing a variety of free comic books (even an Archie will be there).

The event started way back in 2002 when the first Spider-Man movie was released. The hope was that piggybacking off a movie's success and promotion would entice fans to visit their local comic book shops for free books in the hopes of reeling them in for good. Something must be going right, because seven years later it's still going strong. To date, more than 12 million comic books have been given away worldwide.

At first, I was a little afraid that only the dumb, unimportant comic books would be available, kind of like how Best Buy only puts movies like The Quest and Predator 2 in the $5 rack (Danny Glover cannot defeat Predator!!!). Thankfully, Marvel and DC ain't playing no games. An Avengers title written by Marvel's top-dog, Brian Bendis, and drawn by stellar artist, James Cheung, will be available today. These two have worked together on the Avengers a few times before, so it promises to be a quality issue. Oh, and it features Thor. Buy it. DC is releasing Blackest Night #0, a prelude to their event. Anything Green Lantern related is worth reading. For a full list of every comic book tomorrow, click here.

Go out to your local comic book stores, party-people. Just walking in gives you a chance to look around at some of the other selections. Do it enough times, you'll eventually get interested and buy something, realizing you haven't been living your life the way you should have been. Read enough of them and you won't have to wait every two years for a good movie to actually know something about the world. You would already have read it.