RIP, Wizard magazine

Used to be one of my faves. Been utter crap the last year or so. Now it's dead. At least the print version. The website continues.

http://www.bigshinyrobot.com/reviews/archives/20819

 

Hate it for the folks who lost their jobs, but from a content standpoint it's no big loss. Wizard lost its fastball a long time ago. If I had to pinpoint it, I'd say it was sometime around 2003 or 2004 when they transitioned from a magazine that wasn't afraid to poke fun at the truly lame ideas in comics to a shameless promoter of the industry. Fun quick-hit features like the Mort of the Month gave way to yet another slobbering profile of Joe Quesada.
I think it was part of their stated goal of becoming "an Entertainment Weekly for the comic book industry," but it should have turned off anyone with half a brain.

I suppose this means the end of ToyFare, too, which is a bit sadder if only for the loss of "Twisted ToyFare Theatre," which was always entertaining. At least the spirit of that lives on with Robot Chicken.

 

I used to treasure issues of this when I was a kid and subscribed from probably 1990-1998. That they made every caption funny (at least to a 10 year old) was a big selling point for me, and the fact that I used to sit down and chart the two-cent changes in the value of every last one of my nearly worthless comics every month meant I got some extended use out of them every month.

 

Sorry for the people who lost their jobs, but they lost me as a reader a long time ago. Batman is right. They became far too interested in kissing the collective ass of the comic industry to be good any more.

 

Dear Darkseid was always one of my faves.

 

Beckett's Baseball Card Monthly just began sweating.

 

I thought this was going to be about the publication formerly known as Bullets.