Wizard magazine is shutting down and the company (now public) will devote all its efforts to producing comic conventions. This isn’t surprising. Sales of the magazine had dropped significantly in the last decade. (As they have for almost all print magazines in the U.S..) While the convention business grew and grew. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t a sad day.
Wizard magazine was often maligned for its slick, cheerleader attitude to the comic book industry. But, if you were a comic book fan in the last 20 years, you read it. And, we bet, you really liked it. (Even if you never said it out loud.) Whereas the last decade has been marked by podcasts and websites, the nineties was the day of Wizard. And their glossy pages, and rah-rah coverage, were the background music of the era.
It now seems the once maligned cheer-leading has been taken up by most of online news sites. Newarama’s low brow coverage clearly owes more to Wizard than it does to Comics Journal. But those sites don’t offer the excitement of paging through a new copy of Wizard, on the bus or Subway, and dreaming of computer colored worlds as you speed toward the doldrums of your black and white life. Nope, they don’t come close to that. Not by a long shot.
R.I.P. Wizard Magazine. You will be missed.
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