| Now, I was going to
discuss the ongoing slow death of Borders/Barnes and
Noble with this article, but sometimes, pressing matters
jump out and change what we should talk about.
Wizard Magazine needs to be
talked about this week. I know that it’s been talked
about quite a lot in the last few days, but it’s my turn
now. So if you’re here to read, strap yourselves in, get
a snack first, and prepare for some thoughts from a
longtime fan of the magazine.
I remember reading the
very first issue of Wizard Magazine. When it came out, I
was at my friend Bryan’s house and his dad has just
picked that up for him. I was hooked. I loved the
artwork. The ideas. The stories. The commentary on the
comics business. I loved the contests and the letters
pages and the pages devoted to the Price Guide.
I loved it all. And I
loved that first cover of Spidey in the Wizard hat. I’ve
been a lifelong Spider-man fan, which I’ve made no bones
about, so I remember seeing that cover and being hooked.
Spider-Wizard! Please I wanted more.
This was the point in my
life where comics became a very important part of them.
They became companions, friends, family, and comrades.
They became a passion, a love, an art, and eventually, a
calling.
And Wizard was there
right at the beginning. And now here we are, 235 issues
and 20 years later, and the magazine is dead.
There are a lot of people
out there who are clapping. Who are saying it should
have died years ago.
I’m not going to do that.
This is a raging article, but sometimes we don’t rage in
the negative way. Sometimes we rage against the dying of
the light.
|
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I remember
reading Wizard and falling in love with the
X-men at the same time. In between Mortal
Kombat matches, flipping through the pages
of art and stories and just reading all the
news that the magazine could fit. And the
size! I remember loving just how packed to
the brims that magazine used to be. I
remember it being 200-300 pages in its
heyday and being just full of stuff.
Some good like
the Art Contests. Some bad like the pictures
of your pets you could send in.
Some great
like the articles on stuff like Earth X and
Kingdom Come. Some bad like articles on
books that went nowhere (I’m looking at you
Sovereign Seven and Shadowhawk).
Now some of
you might agree with me. When this book was
on, it was great. I remember one article
that I will never forget that dealt with
Steven Seagle and Joe Kelly and their X-Men
plans and just being in awe of it. I can’t
remember if it was before or after they
left, but I remember just wanting so badly
to read what they had planned but couldn’t
get done.
Either way.
Wizard had a special place in my heart for
years.
I remember
the Wizard 2000 issue with the cover by
Kevin Maguire with all the future characters
(Maestro, Batman Beyond, Days of Future Past
Wolverine, Spider-Girl, etc). I remember all
the awesome inserts that I still have like
Deadpool 0, Earth X 0, the comic that was
Alex Ross’ first comic for Marvel (still
have it somewhere), the cards, the games,
everything. |
I remember the day that I
stopped buying the magazine even.
It wasn’t out of spite.
It was out of necessity. I picked up the comic through
my formative years, all through high school, and into
college. Once I hit college, my comic reading ebbed big
time. It wasn’t because I was too cool to read them. It
was because I was too poor. I was paying rent and bills
and working two jobs and getting school loans and
everything a student is supposed to do.
Buying food seemed more
important most weeks than buying comics. So I had to go
without. I even almost made an enemy with a comic shop
owner because I couldn’t buy the books I asked him to
put in my pull list. It would have been bad because to
this day, I still buy my comics from him, 10 years
later.
So Wizard stopped being
bought, right about 2003. I didn’t get the subscription
even though month after month, year after year, I kept
meaning to get it. It was so cheap to buy. And I would
flip through store copies at Borders or Barnes and Noble
or at the comic stores and just check through it.
I would read articles on
the website and still follow it. But I wouldn’t buy the
magazine, because I didn’t have the money for it.
Then, when I left college
and moved into my own place outside of my parents’ home,
I had all my old Wizard magazines. I had hundreds of
them in a box and I would flip through them from time to
time. I loved reading the old articles and seeing how
much things had changed.
| And then I
went, and this was probably 2007, and looked
at a new magazine on the stands. No price
guide. No art contest. No top ten. Not much
of anything. I was shocked. I was hurt. I
felt like something I had loved and lost was
truly lost. Was gone forever and never to
return.
It was truly
depressing because what was once a titan in
the comic industry had fallen on rough
times, and was spending too much time on
their website and leaving their magazine to
fall by the wayside.
And the page
count had decreased dramatically. What was
once 300 pages was now barely 100 pages. And
it was depressing. All the best content was
gone. But it didn’t matter. My love had
still been there, and no matter how much had
changed, I still wanted to give it a shot.
But then my
wife and I decided to move, and one of the
things that was left in the move were my old
Wizard magazines. To make room for my newly
increased comic reading and graphic novel
purchasing, I had to get rid of them. It was
depressing to toss all of that old love
away. It was like taking something you loved
and just trashing it. |
 |
That’s exactly what it
was. I was ridding myself of the past and dropping the
magazines in the waste as if they were nothing.
It was hard to do.
And when we moved, I
immediately regretted it, but there was no going back.
All of the old magazines were gone and never to return.
So I thought, it’s time to give the magazine one more
try. And in early 2010 I did. And I was shocked. It was
worse than ever.
Some of the articles were
insanely good. But there was a small two page article
devoted to up and comers who would sweep the comics
world (whereas before when it was done, back when Carlos
Pacheco and Ladronn were on the list, it was a page or
more per artist). There was 5 pages devoted to 25 comics
that we would never see that would have been awesome
(again, I think it was nearly 12 pages the first time
they had done the same story).
There was a 4 page
article devoted to something Mark Millar was doing (and
by 4 pages, it was probably 1 and a half pages of
content and the rest was art and junk filling the page
around the content). There was a 6 page article with
directors and writers in Hollywood about comic movies
and the changing landscape and it just seemed like
filler.
It sucked. I felt
betrayed, just like all comic fans feel, when something
they love changes on them and they feel they had no
input in the change.
| It meant I
wouldn’t buy another issue. I wasn’t going
to pay 6 dollars for fluff and a ton of ads
about things I would never buy or cons I
probably would never go to because I had no
interest in meeting Laura Vandervoort. I
didn’t feel like the content was enough and
the page count was definitely not worth the
6 dollar page count.
Had they smartly
changed the price to 3 or 4 dollars, I might
have been apt to try it and give it a
chance. Hearing from people all over the
internet, I know that a lot of people loved
what this magazine was doing. Loved the
articles and the chances they were taking.
But it wasn’t
the same. What once was lost would never be
found. And the imitators like Clint wouldn’t
fill the void because the content problem on
that magazine is exactly the same. A Bunch
of bad comics that I could care less about
and articles I could read about on Deadline
or CBR or Newsarama or anywhere else.
All over the
country, newspapers are dying. Print media
is dying. So it shouldn’t be a big surprise
that this magazine has died. But it still
stings. It still makes us feel nostalgic for
what once was there.
We raise a
glass and toast what once was the king of
the ring. Wizard was the leader in news and
gossip, and it’s been overtaken by the
internet. It happens. |
 |
All we can do is remember
the good times it gave us and hope that in the meantime,
while I might have not been reading it, maybe someone
else was and got the same feeling from it that I once
did.
I only wish that they
would have put out a special, huge, collector’s edition
magazine as a going away party. A last celebration.
Hell, I wish they would just put out a magazine full of
all the unpublished art from their contests and artist
searches. I mean, I put in for about 7 of them, so it’d
be nice to see some of my redesigns for Superman and
Iron Man show up again. I bet they could still play.
Or I’m just making myself
feel better since I’m a terrible artist. Either way.
Goodbye Wizard Magazine.
And Godspeed. |
