Wizard Magazine Canceled; My Childhood Just Wept.
It was announced today that Wizard magazine is closing its doors. For the forever and everything. News broke while I was probably discussing something retarded like editing the manuscripts of Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders in class on campus. When I returned I returned to the inter-pipes, I found the world changed.
ComicsAlliance has received confirmation that Wizard Magazine is to close its doors immediately after twenty years. Nearly all staff have been laid off and all freelancers terminated. Sister publication ToyFare, covering the action figures and collectibles industry, has also been shut down. Additionally, parent Wizard World, Inc. has become a public company (off-exchange) that will administer the brand’s convention business and launch a new digital magazine also called Wizard World whose aim is presumably the same as the print version they just shuttered.
It’s a bummer more in theory to me than in actuality. I had long since stopped buying the magazine. After giving it up during a break I took from comic books; henceforth known as the Dark Ages, I never really got back into it. I recall picking up a copy of it randomly one week and flipping through it. I was aghast, it was a rolling line of product placement and corporate ball-washings. Confusedly, I brought this up to the dude that runs the local comic book shop.
He informed me that it was always that way, I was just young and nubile. Definitely nubile.
Still though, it’s a symbolic sad face. Wizard was a staple of my childhood. Prior to the internet, it was the only place for me to feast on comic book news and random shots of tits and ass. My young pubescent body could barely contain the excitement I got from reading about Kevin Smith and Joe Quesada’s upcoming run on Daredevil, let alone gawk at some cleavage-laden artwork from J. Scott Campbell or the like. I lived for it.
Its death makes sense, but its just another vestige of my golden time in comic books. As clichés are spit and the whatever, nothing will ever top when I first started reading comic books. I may read just as many comic books as I did back then, I may even enjoy them just as much. Yet, there’s something, some innocence to the time period that can’t be replicated. That’s slowly dying off, bit by bit. Chicken McNuggets, Wizard, and a healthy dose of …And Justice For All was all I needed to get through my confusing week of middle school. Fuck, it’s all I probably need to get through a confusing week of graduate school.
It was inevitable, but it doesn’t ease the bummerosity of the situation. I imagine this is all a prelude up until the day my comic book store has to close, as to when print medium goes completely digital, and the world trudges along. Fuck, I’m beginning to feel old.
Farewell Wizard, you beautiful son of a bitch.