The first Saturday of May brings us one of the best days of the year for comic book fans, Free Comic Book Day. I thought it might be interesting to look at who “likes” Free Comic Book Day on Facebook and how that compares with the general comic population.

Though a little over 401,000 individuals like Free Comic Book Day in some aspect, a whopping 300,000 are in the United States, 74.72%. Of that, men account for 200,000 of them, that’s 66.67% of the US likes, and women account for 90,000 and 30%. The general comic population is much more even at 57.14% male and 42.14% female, showing the day to celebrate comics could use some work to bring it in line with the general comic populace.

Gender isn’t the only thing that differs between Free Comic Book Day likes and general comic “fan” likes. The age of those individuals is vastly different as well. Free Comic Book Day caters to an older audience of likes. For FCBD, 63% population is concentrated between ages 18 and 29, and almost half of it is between ages 22 and 33. For the general comic population, almost half of it is between ages 18 and 25 and those between then age of 18 to 29 is almost 60% of the population. The big difference is between those under the age of 18 which is a little over 8% of the comic population and a little over 4% of the FCBD population.

This information got me to wonder if the all-ages titles are really worth it. I haven’t looked up the general comic population to see how it compares, but parents clock in at 58,000 of the likes for Free Comic Book Day, that’s 19.33%. Of that, we have ages for under half of those parents. The largest segment have children ages 16 to 19. We’ll explore another day how that compares to parents of comic fans generally.