Glossy magazine, billed itself as "
The Guide to Comics." A magazine by and for
comic book fanboys. Founded back in the early
1990s by a
New York comic store owner named
Gareb Shamus, it grew to become the largest and most
successful publication about comic books.
Wizard did some things very, very right. They are, nearly always,
funny as hell, in a
crude,
junior-high way. Their
news section was excellent -- I've even seen them get the
scoop over internet news sources -- no mean feat when you consider that the
finishing touches on the magazine are completed months before it's actually published. As the most
prominent comics magazine around, Wizard also got handed all the big stories and all the best
interviews -- Wizard got interviews with all of the top creators.
But Wizard also did a lot of stuff very, very wrong. They used to have pretty good coverage of
small press and
independent comics, but they unloaded that several years ago in order to put more focus on
DC,
Marvel, and
Image. Everyone on the staff seemed to be a hardcore
Marvel Zombie -- almost everytime they had a Best
Character/Best
Creator/Best
Costume/Best
Whatever list, the number-one spot was guaranteed to either
Wolverine,
Spider-Man, or
Stan Lee, the creator of Spider-Man. (A couple of years ago, they even designated
Peter Parker as the "
Best New Character of the Year", despite the fact that Peter Parker was actually created in the
1960s) The magazine had quite
shallow tastes in comics, always preferring comics with pretty
art over comics with good
writing. They never really accepted that the comics-as-
investment and art-first-story-last
crazes of the early
1990s helped send the
comics industry into a
financial tailspin, so they continued to push the comics companies to produce more
crap.
One of the more
frustrating aspects of the magazine was the staff's tendency to
hype themselves. Besides the cute "Meet-the-Staff" section in the back and occasional mini-features on their Halloween parties, they often ran
photo-comic features in which, for instance, the magazine staff battles
Galactus for the fate of Earth. While moderately
amusing, it's
irritating to think that they wasted space on this
masturbatory nonsense when they could have been writing about
comics.
Honestly, Wizard often gave the
impression of being written and published by
adolescent boys whose main concerns are girls with
big boobs,
console video games, saying
bad words, and reading comics with lots of
fight scenes. Surely, adolescent boys are a big part of the magazine's
audience, but it's not
all of their audience -- and the minute one of those adolescent boys wants something from the magazine beyond
fart jokes,
chicks in thongs, and
fawning interviews with
Todd McFarlane... well, there wasn't that much of the magazine that wa
sn't about
farts,
thongs, and McFarlane...
During his
keynote speech at the 2001
Harvey Awards, comics legend
Frank Miller, creator of "
Batman: The Dark Knight Returns" and "
Sin City," called Wizard "
this bible written by Satan" and later said:
"For all the disgust you’ll hear about Wizard and its shoddy practices when you talk to publishers and marketing folks -- and I have yet to hear a single good word from anybody about this thing that ought to come on a roll -- for all of that, the publishers kow-tow. Even though this tree killer here regularly cheapens and poisons our field. Aesthetically and ethically, they grovel. Even though this monthly vulgarity reinforces all the prejudice people hold about comics, they cry to all the world that we’re as cheap and stupid and trashy as they think we are, we sponsor this assault. We pay for the goddamn privilege. But really, when will we finally get around to flushing this thing, this load of crap, once and for all?"
Miller got enthusiastic applause.
The magazine still took a very, very long time to die. The final issue didn't arrive until March of 2011.