The best comic book covers of the week – 23 March 2020

Posted on March 23, 2020

3 min read

CORONAVIRUS! Now that we’ve got that out of the way, let’s talk about how the damn pandemic is hitting comic book fans hardest: Free Comic Book Day. As you’d imagine, the annual celebration of the greatest thing to come out of America since the invention of ruthless capitalism aggression, isn’t going to be taking place this May.

Postponed to a later date this year, FCBD is just one of many events having been hit hard in recent weeks and having hundreds of fans crowding around a table to grab a few freebies naturally led to it being rescheduled to when the virus dust has cleared and the world outside is safer to explore. “With restaurants and other businesses closing and many areas implementing event restrictions, we know that Free Comic Book Day will be impacted to varying degrees throughout the world,” Diamond Comic Distributors chairman/founder Steve Geppi said in a press letter.

The severity and timing of that impact can’t be predicted with any certainty, but the safety of our retailers and fans is too important to risk. With that in mind, we have made the difficult decision to postpone the event to a date later in the Summer. To minimize the impact on our primary distribution operations and prioritize the distribution of weekly new comics and restocks, a number of FCBD titles will be included with each regular weekly shipment for the next several weeks.
These titles will be invoiced at no charge, as we extend the billing out approximately 90 days, to the first week in August. The books may not be in separate boxes from the rest of the shipment, except when full cases are shipped. We will follow up with more information soon regarding FCBD non-comic merchandise soon. We will also update our consumer-facing pages with this information and provide further information via email and Diamond Daily as it becomes available.

That doesn’t mean that you can’t read comics right now! While many a local comic book shop is looking to reach fans by mailing out their weekly pull list, digital stores such as Comixology are also offering a heck of an incentive to subscribe. Comixology’s Unlimited plan which allows for thousands of comic books to read, has now extended its trial period from one month to two, although you’ll need to do a little VPN magic to take advantage of this if you inhabit a land beyond the borders of North America.

Comic books will need to think outside of the box if they want to survive in the months to come, and with covers like the ones below, at least they’ll be able to take advantage of cabin fever situations by offerings fan plenty of printed diversions.