WIZARD BECOMES WIZARDWORLD
Wizard, the glossy monthly magazine about comics, is no longer in print. Ditto the publisher’s ToyFare magazine. Starting in March, the print Wizard will be replaced by a digital version called WizardWorld. It will cover comic books, toys, and superheroes and the personalities behind them, kittyspride.com announced at the end of January. The publisher recently went public as Wizard World, Inc., and it seems focused now on its program of popular culture shows, the Comic Con Tour, that is supposed to convene all around the country in 12 cities this year.
With the expiration of Wizard magazine, the venerable Comics Buyer’s Guide (CBG) now stands alone as the only monthly magazine about comics. The Comics Journal went digital in December 2009 (at tcj.com), resorting to print only once a year in a “book format,” the first “issue” of which is coming in at around 600 pages and is poised, even as I scrawl this unrepentent prose, to emerge.
At the CBG, editor Brent Frankenhoff can’t help but insinuate a tiny note of victory in his announcement of Wizard’s demise: launched in 1991, Wizard: A Guide to Comics was, Frankenhoff says, “a glossy comics magazine designed to compete with many other comics-related magazines [most obviously, given the deployment of the term ‘guide,’ CBG]. In the years since, all of those publications have changed formats or frequencies or gone out of business.”
CBG changed format, abandoning its weekly newsprint paper format for a slick-paper color-cover monthly magazine about 4-5 years ago; it was an obvious attempt to meet the perceived competition of Wizard. (But Frankenhoff is careful to note that “others may have perceived a rivalry [between CBG and Wizard, but] we’ve always had friendly relations with Gareb and his staffers at his many shows.” Of course; why not be friends? You can be friends with your competition. No law against that. But friendly relations do not eliminate rivalry.) After a few years going head to head, toe-to-toe, now CBG is the last of its breed still standing.
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Posted by: Artsuperhero | April 18, 2011 at 10:15 AM