With great power comes . . . free comics!

As everybody knows, or ought to know, the first Saturday in May is when comics publishers and comic book store proprietors throughout the Marvel and DC Universes celebrate their independence from bullies by giving away books for the low, low price of bupkis.

Wait, strike almost all of that. First off, the perception that comics (or “sequential art,” to use the term preferred by Will Eisner, one of the pioneering masters of the form) are all about superheroes has always been one of the major reasons they’ve usually been thought of as mostly kids’ stuff in this country (and nowhere else in the world). But in an age when even deeply personal, emotionally sophisticated independent books like Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis or Dan Clowes’s Ghost World get adapted into movies, it’s probably safe to say the medium has turned a corner. (Nothing against super-heroes, mind you — we’ll be lining up for the much-praised Iron Man flick this weekend just like everyone else).