What is this, another new blog series? Well, maybe. Defunct magazines and websites are a topic that has come up on this site more than a few times, and maybe deserve their own category. However, this is definitely a “new one gets posted when I feel like it” kind of project, so don’t expect a regular schedule.
I was not reading Wizard magazine during its heyday—that was probably in its first few years of existence, when it quickly established itself as the publication of record of the early nineties comics boom period, where big issues of big series from hotshot artists and writers at Marvel and Image could ship a million copies or more, where event storylines like “The Death of Superman” were becoming national news, and where comics market speculation seemed like a surefire money-maker, aided and abetted by the price guides prominently featured at the back of every issue of the magazine. Wizard was the lead hype-maker, telling you every month who the ten hottest creators were in the industry (or, more accurately, the superhero and superhero-adjacent part of the industry) and which upcoming books were going to shake the medium to its core. As for the price guides, given how many stories you were hearing about the first appearances of Superman or Batman going for a million bucks at the auction houses, surely the first appearances of such eternal characters as Wetworks and X-O Manowar would eventually appreciate in value if preserved in mint condition, especially with all those fancy chromium covers. Comics were a finally a Big Deal after spending decades on the margins, and nothing was going to stop their rising fortunes…except for an industry collapse, instigated by greed-driven corporate decisions, the general flakiness of some of the new big name publishers when it came to actually releasing books, and the bursting of the speculator bubble (who would have thought that books with large, modern print runs wouldn’t become valuable at any point?), which led to hundreds of comic book stores closing, Marvel declaring bankruptcy, every other company downsizing, and a single surviving company monopolizing distribution.
Yet, Wizard, which embodied everything that led to those apocalyptic moments in the comics industry in the mid to late nineties, just kept going. Against all odds, they survived where others had shuttered, and kept chugging along doing what they always did well throug the Dark Ages, waiting for some event or another to pick things up. When I started reading the magazine in early 2003, things were picking up.
I was not much of a comics reader growing up (outside my wild year reading Archie’s Sonic the Hedgehog comics, already chronicled on this site), and certainly not a superhero comics reader—I was more than happy just watching Marvel and DC characters on TV (the mid-nineties Spider-Man was a particular favourite, while I also happily watched the contemporaneous X-Men and Batman series, and hey, I even liked the Adam West Batman when it was being rerun) or playing as them in video games. Even then, it’s not like the ideas or aesthetic of superheroes appealed to me more than any other type of thing—I’m pretty sure I was much more into cartoonier stuff, and a character like Kirby was just as important to me as Batman or Spider-Man, if not more so. But by 2003, superhero fever was in the air thanks to a successful string of comic book adaptations, especially the first Sam Raimi Spider-Man movie, which had a lot of buzz around it in 2002 and set all sorts of box office records (one of those early times when it seemed like everyone suddenly cared about box office records.) What ended up pushing me over the edge from indifferent onlooker to casually curious about superhero comics back then was Heroclix, the collectible strategy miniatures game by Wizkids (whose previous miniatures game, Mage Knight, had attracted my attention one summer) that was certainly striking when the iron was hot, and introduced me to a legion of Marvel and DC characters I had never heard of. That, in turn, had me checking out all the comic fans sites on the Internet that chronicled the histories of even the most obscure superheroes and supervillains, a fascinating and deep realm to dive into. That critical mass of cultural pressure finally convinced me to pick up an issue of the publication that called itself THE Comics Magazine, to finally see what these things were actually about.
No one seemed to be happier about the sudden onslaught of superhero movies than Wizard, who devoted page after page of coverage to the whole gaggle of them—X2, Daredevil, and Hulk over a six month period—hyping them to the gills just as they had to the big comic releases of the early nineties (and, not unlike some of those event comics, it was fun to see just how long it took them to turn on the ones that disappointed.) It was clear that Hollywood’s revived interest in comic book properties felt like validation to those sectors of the comic industry, and there was a (rather naive) sense that all the normies going to see these movies would eventually decide to visit a comic shop and see what their new favourite characters were up to every month. When Wizard wasn’t talking about comic-based movies both existent and not-as-much (every studio was grabbing every character they could get their hands on, and it is somewhat surreal in retrospect to see some of those eyebrow-raising proposals from 2004 or 2006 actually become reality fifteen years later), or pushing their still massive price guide (now with the addition backing of the CGC, a company that can tell you if your old comics are really worth anything, for a nominal fee of course), they were still talking up the big new stories and creators at a seemingly energized Marvel and DC. Many of those hot creators remain important to this day, and some of them have even avoided saying or doing things that torpedoed their reputations along the way!
This was certainly an interesting time to be reading about, and eventually actually reading, Marvel and DC comics (I was mainly borrowing those comics from some longtime fans I knew), as both publishers were emphasizing status quo altering storylines for their biggest characters, as well as more singular, creator-driven comics (like the Peter Milligan/Mike Allred celebrity satire X-Statix, which I loved at the time), sometimes bold in the creative sense, often times bold in the fan button-pushing sense, and every year they seemed to want to outdo the last. Marvel even got to double-dip, in a way, as they were running both the traditional comics line as well as the then-popular Ultimate comics, “modern” re-imaginings of their most popular characters without the decades of continuity, which regularly outsold their older counterparts and made some veteran fans feel threatened. If people were suddenly paying attention to superheroes, the purveyors of superheroes wanted to give them something to pay attention to.
(There were also indie comics about things that weren’t superheroes, and Wizard also gave a few pages of perfectly adequate coverage to those as well. I didn’t get the alternative part of the industry hammered into my skull the same way as everything else, but they planted the seeds in my mind that there were other things there to read.)
What’s funny to me now, looking at the era of comics I was reading about in Wizard (between 2003 and 2006—the magazine kept going until 2011), was how the publishers’ attention-grabbing story ideas seem almost at odds with what people were really getting out of their movie counterparts. It seems obvious nowadays that the initial explosion of superheroes in movie theatres was not just a case of special effects finally being up to the task, but a desire for real escapism in what was a very scary time. Movies like those, and also big budget fantasy stuff like Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings, became exceptionally popular right after 9/11 (which I’ve written about elsewhere), and kept coming right as we entered the age of terrorist threats, arguments about security and freedom, and endless war. These stories had clear good-vs-evil struggles with colourful characters, which provided a mighty respite from everything else going on. Heck, even “Weird” Al Yankovic’s humorous recounting of the first Spider-Man movie, to the tune of Billy Joel, alludes to that. Meanwhile, the stories that Wizard was hyping in that period were often increasingly violent, paranoid, and otherwise highly cynical, with big deal miniseries like DC’s Identity Crisis bringing in all the “joy” of a trashy airport novel to make their universe of colourful characters more “complex.” It wasn’t the juvenile grim-and-gritty darkness that defined the nineties (or, for that matter, the “realistic” take of films like Batman Begins, which came out amidst it all), but a lurid, talky, adult-oriented kind of storytelling that seemed to make the Wizard readers go wild. Those comics were also based heavily on obscure continuity references, retcons, and subversions of comics history that really only work when you’ve been immersed in those things for a while, furthering their rather beginner-unfriendly nature (on the other hand, Marvel’s attempts to attract new readers, aside from the Ultimate comics, were often rather embarrassing plays at the burgeoning manga fanbase, an initiative whose only lasting contribution was the Brian K. Vaughn/Adrian Alphona series Runaways.) These were comics that seemed to wallow in misery, when the new superhero fans were trying desperately to get away from it.
(Ironically, while the mean-spirited tone of comics like Avengers reboot The Ultimates or the gigantic crossover Civil War—both written by Mark Millar, an admitted provocateur—was utilized to make the characters more appealing to Hollywood, right up to having artist Bryan Hitch draw the main cast of the former to resemble famous actors, the eventual Hollywood adaptations of Marvel’s stuff would eschew all but the most surface elements of those and adopt a lighter, jokier sensibility.)
So, while those comics did seem to pick up sales and generate enthusiasm at the time, at least among the direct market set, chances are their insular and abrasive style didn’t end up attracting that many new long term readers. “Insular” and “abrasive” could also be applied to Wizard itself—while the style of humour the magazine employed is not much different from its sister magazine Toyfare, which I also read, it does seem to lean a bit more into the frat bro stuff. I mean, it was the style at the time, but it can still be eyebrow-raising in places. Certainly, they weren’t above shoving cheesecake art in their pages whenever possible, or making creepy jokes about the actresses they interviewed (but they make fun of themselves about it, so that makes it A-OK), and then wonder why there seemed to be so few women in the industry. What an impenetrable mystery!
From Wizard, and from numerous comics websites, I became fairly knowledgeable in the comings and goings of the comics industry, what the trends were, and even some of the more obscure parts of its history (Wizard loved nothing more than dredging up oddball storylines, characters, and covers for mockery), all while sampling a few different series from Marvel and DC and others at the time—I was one of those new readers they dreamed about, the ones coming in because of the multimedia adaptations of those characters, and was totally on board with joining their ranks. But after feeling the initial thrill of seeing those big stories pushing status quo changes and controversial plot twists as they happened, I stopped finding them particularly interesting. Shocking, I know. Since hyping up that sort of thing (alongside the never-ending movies) remained their bread-and-butter, my check-ups with Wizard became more infrequent over time (although I did get to see their shift from perfect bound to Entertainment Weekly-style staple-bound, the kind of change that people did take very seriously once upon a time), and my comics reading habits in the latter years of high school became more focused on the “adult” genre fare of DC’s Vertigo imprint, and then went in a completely different direction after that. Superhero comics became a thing I followed only from a distance, as even if the comics themselves did nothing for me, the drama of the industry and its very opinionated fans was still pretty fascinating, and entertaining, to observe. Like a lot of my magazine reading habits, my time with Wizard was as much about peering into a strange other world as it was about actually wanting to join it.
A Scrapbook of Infinite Noise 