There Is No Man Behind The Curtain

One of my Wizard stories

Wizard Magazine, the publication where my comic book career started, released its final print issue today, as near as I can tell.

That may not be true--as a monthly, Wizard usually operates about three months ahead, and it's possible that we'll be getting ghostly reminders of what was for the next couple of months. Anyway, this Monday it was announced that the magazine was closing its doors effective immediately and ceasing publication, making way for a February launch of "Wizard World", an online equivalent which presumably will cost publisher Gareb Shamus and his newly-public corporation less overhead while keeping the brand alive.

I was only there for a year or so, and it was more than ten years ago now. But it really has shaped my comics experience, both as a fan and as a professional. Zack Smith over at Newsarama wrote a great "eulogy" for the magazine that said a lot of the things I would have wanted to say--and a conversation with Eric Ratcliffe last night for the Why I Love Comics podcast (ours isn't on the site yet--the link leads to Eric's most recent episode) laid bare a lot of my feelings about the place, and anecdotes about my time there...but it seemed like I ought to write...something.

I met Dan Jurgens (over the phone) on my first day at Wizard. As an intern, I was given a list of people to call and to introduce myself as the new Wizard guy so that if we needed to get an interview quickly, the introductions would already have been done. One of those guys was Jurgens, who I ended up talking to a week later about his Titans/Legion of Superheroes crossover. We got along well from the start, and he actually called my editor to put in a good word for me after that second conversation/first interview. Needless to say, ten years later as we were doing commentary tracks on each individual issue of Booster Gold I thought back to Wizard and imagined that The Gold Exchange probably wouldn't have existed without it.

I was also introduced to Terry Moore's Strangers in Paradise there, when I saw a piece of original art hanging on the wall of Andrew Kardon (a staff writer there at the time) being bawled out by one of the characters. Andy had apparently written good things about SiP and that was what came out of it. Strangers in Paradise, for those who don't know, is my personal pick for the single greatest achievement in American sequential art.

I also first heard of Frederic Wertham there. When we did our end-of-the-century issue, and I had to cover the '50s, it exposed me for the first time to the Comics Code crunch and to things like Terry & the Pirates. Even though it was just one issue, that moment for me was so essential to a full and sophisticated understanding of American sequential art that I was always able to dismiss the people who bitched about Wizard being nothing but a PR tool for the big two. Yeah, there was a lot of that--and its role grew as the magazine aged--but even at the height of its hype they took time (this was a story mandated by Managing Editor Joe Yanarella and not someone's passion project) to talk about something that many mainstream fans were (are?) probably woefully unaware of. And my writing about it took page count away from whatever Alex Ross was doing that month!

I also met a number of good people and good friends there, from Matt (Robot Chicken) Senreich, who used to do Twisted Mego Theater for Wizard and ToyFare, to the spectacularly nice Rus (The Walking Dead) Wooton, who used to be a design-and-layout guy at Wizard before taking his lettering skills on the road. I probably still owe both Rus and Mel Caylo (who's currently in charge of PR for Archaia Comics) a few bucks, considering that I was dead broke at 19, living in an expensive part of the world and making basically the $250 a month my internship provided, and we somehow still managed to go out to Taco Bell like three times a week. Lars Pearson, the old price guide guy, gave me a galley print of his Dr. Who book I, Who, which remains in my collection despite the fact that I don't particularly care for Dr. Who. Brian Cunningham, who inquired about putting me back on the freelance list after an eight-year lag only to find himself working at DC Comics a few months later, was one of the nicer and more helpful editors I ever knew. And Joe Yanarella, the editor who started giving me freelance work when he found out how broke I was, probably helped more than anyone else by editing my stuff mercilessly (seriously--I think he hated my actual writing) and giving me the notion that journalism was something I could do long-term.  Of course, given the state of the journalism industry (and of Wizard), I may want to slap him around for that.

And those are just the life-altering things. I got to dress up as the Wizard Bunny and swing a hammer at someone called Keep-Squeezin'-Them-Monkeys-Lad for a photo shoot. I got to do another photo shoot where I dressed up as a typical comic nerd with a Flash t-shirt and a flannel and taped-up glasses and swat one of my co-writers in the face with a copy of Watchmen. I got to work with a number of great people in a truly bizarre and sometimes stressful work environment, and years later I met and befriended Josh Elder of Reading With Pictures and Brendan McGinley of Dose over our mutual frustration with the direction the magazine had been taking when we worked there...even though I hadn't worked directly with either of them.

If you want to know what I think about the whys and hows of Wizard's downfall, listen to the Why I Love Comics podcast. I talk a lot about the things that were done wrong and about a bizarre incident in which I tried to tell my editors that they should have a better web presence, only to be put on a feature that spotlighted OTHER comics websites IN the print magazine. For the moment, though, I just want to say thanks to all the people who made my brief time at Wizard a little bit better. Without it--without them--I would never be working at Comic Related (or Newsarama) now, and would likely not be working on a graphic novel right now. I'm raising a glass to Dan, Rus, Mel, Matt, Andy, Lars, Yanarella and the rest tonight...and even to Gareb, who (even though I barely knew him) built something great.