Owners of Marin's Only Comic Book Shop Are Fired Up for Free Comic Book Day

BAMMMM ....POWWWWWW.....WOWWWWW!!!!!!!!!!

Anyone who walks into Blue Moon Comics in San Rafael's West End or any of the thousands of independent comic book shops around the world Saturday on Free Comic Book Day will, as the moniker suggests, walk out with at least one free comic book.

Free Comic Book Day started in 2002 as a way to help independent comic stores survive competition with convenience stores and the Internet, and is held the first weekend in May every year.

Anyone visiting the stores can walk out with one-time printings of a panoply of comics from Superman to the Smurfs. (See the complete list here.)

At Blue Moon Comics, co-owner Sam Shiffler says Free Comic Book Day is always an exciting one, with hordes of people showing up for a freebie. He reminds patrons to keep the event in perspective. "It is Free Comic Book Day, not free greed day," he says.

One of the books that will be given away was drawn by a Santa Cruz artist who is a rarity in the world of colorful fiction.

Evan Stanley only 20 years old, but despite her name, she is a woman in a very male-dominated business.

"It's amazing that she's from here and so young," said Joe Ferrara, owner of the Santa Cruz comic book store Atlantis Fantasyworld, where Stanley will be signing the comic and maybe doing some live sketches for fans Saturday at 10 a.m.

Stanley works on Sonic the Hedgehog comics, a video game-inspired franchise owned by Archie Comics in New York. The story of how she got her job sounds like it's right out of a comic.

She entered a contest which was looking for drawings of Sonic, the 22-year-old character from a Japanese video game by Sega. The return email she got two years ago didn't just tell her she won; it asked if she wanted a job.

"Ahhh," she says. "I've been very lucky. It's such a great opportunity. I give it 100 percent every day. My goal in life was to work for Archie comics. That's pretty much the tops of what I had in mind for my life. Unfortunately, I got there early. My goal now is to get better at illustration and find a new outlet."

That could be working for a film studio such as Pixar or Dreamworks, as well as writing her own comics and creating her own characters. She's minoring in creative writing to help with that.

Raised in the woods near Henry Cowell Park between Scotts Valley and Santa Cruz, she was homeschooled and started attending Cabrillo College at 13. She got her Associates Degree at 18 and transfered to San Jose State University, where she is studying animation and illustration.

"I have an unusual relationship with comics for someone working in the industry," she says. "I didn't grow up with comics. I was into Calvin and Hobbes, and had some of their book collections, and my mom read me comics, like Bone."

But she got her first taste of super heros from the movie Spider-Man 2, her favorite comic outside the Archie line.

"Free Comic Book Day is very important to me," she says. "It was one of the first times I got to get a stack of comics and read them all. It opened my eyes that there was a whole industry out there."

She went to the world's biggest gathering of comic book creators and fans called Comicon in San Diego for the first time last year, and because she didn't understand the registration process, ended up paying, even though she was a featured artist.

She'll know better next year.

"I was so happy to meet the people I've been working with for a year and everyone was so nice and enthusiastic and I got to have great discussions about the books."