THE NEW AND IMPROVED WIZARD?

           This week, the new and improved Wizard made its debut in mailboxes and comic stores across the country. Sporting a new format that increased the size of the magazine dedicated to comics and pop culture, the Wizard is nearly an inch taller and a half inch wider. While these alterations are new, the Wizard has been slowly transforming over the last few years. These subtle changes have not been for the better.

The Wizard of Yesterday

            I remember buying the first copy of the Wizard back in 1991 right before the 90’s comics boom got into full swing. It was a welcome, fresh addition to a comics market in desperate need of a mainstream-style magazine dedicated to comics. There were other monthly magazines dedicated to comics back then, but none them had the feeling of the Wizard.
            Wizard was founded by Gareb Shamus while attending college and working in his parent’s comic store. He developed a friendship with comics super-weight Todd MacFarlane and early copies of Wizard reflect this. Some of the success of Image and Valiant Comics can be attributed to Wizard due to its endorsement of these companies while they were in their infancies.
            Wizard was unique in that it was both a source of comic’s information as well as a monthly price guide. The local store I frequented back then used a magazine called Comics Value Monthly and the typesetting looked like one of my high school term papers I banged out on my mom’s old Royal typewriter. Wizard was slick and glossy like a real magazine. This made my hobby of comic collecting seem like the “in-thing”.    By 1994, it was THE magazine for comics although its price guide and content tended to favor the major publishers at the time (especially Image). At times, their price guide tended to over-inflate prices of newer books which (it could be argued) led to an inflated value of comics (more on this below). But despite this, Wizard had become the standard and the measuring stick for all others. Several other magazine publishers launched short lived knock-offs. The Fan, (published by Overstreet- perhaps the most respected name in comic price guides) and the Hero were two such publications. By the late 1990s, the Wizard became the IT magazine for comics. If you were a comic publisher or creator and you could get Wizard to feature your projects, you had immediate street-cred in the comics industry.
            At the end of the decade, Wizard seemed to be a juggernaut of comics information. So powerful was the publication that critics began to accuse the Wizard of giving preferential treatment to DC and Marvel in exchange for news exclusives. Mull that over for a second…how many times have your read in the Wizard about how great the next project by whichever massive company/hot writer/awesome artist team was going to make comics history? Such a relationship (if one did/does exist) would be a stream that both parties could grow fat in.

            I also mentioned over-inflated prices and I need to focus on this a bit more. The early 1990’s were a time of great growth within the comics industry. Perhaps no other single event attracted more new blood in comic collecting than the 1992 DC Comics storyline, The Death of Superman featured in Superman #75. This comic quickly sold out and was soon fetching over a $100 each. The black-bagged cover price was only $2.50.
           As far as the price guides went at the time, Wizard was leading the charge in reporting how hot this book was and set the market price. It seemed that a small investment of capital could be turned into a fortune overnight and people rushed to cash in on the craze. Between the years of 1992 and 1996 within a 25 mile radius of the city of Macon, there were over ten stores in business that specialized in comic books. (Compare that number to the number of stores that exist in the same area today…two by my count) By 1997, the party was over and the guests, driven to madness by those dreaded inflated values, were making a rowdy exit. Wizard shares some of the blame for this by re-enforcing the high prices and driving the speculative market.
          Now, Wizard is the only major monthly comic price guide. With no competition in the current market, the magazine has the run of the candy store. Recently, Wizard has gorged itself on this candy and grown increasingly fat. In my opinion, they have also grown complacent. With the help of Brian Thompson who loaned me a few back issues of the magazine that he had in his collection, I recently did a small study about the content of Wizard over a four year period. Below are four issues I selected to examine:

Wizard 142    July 2003                    $4.99

The Wizard issue number 142 sported an Ultimate Wolverine Cover and featured a preview of the upcoming series by DC Comics to be called Superman/Batman by Jeph Loeb and Ed McGuiness. There was also an informative article on former Marvel Editor-In-Chief and Valiant Comics founder Jim Shooter. The feature article was the 2003 Preview of the hottest summer releases from Marvel Comics for all the Marvel Zombies out there in comic land. 26 of the 184 pages were dedicated to their price guide section. The price guide had over 350 title entries and made up 14% of the total magazine.

Wizard 150    April 2004                  $4.99

The anniversary issue 150 was even bigger. With a Jim Lee Superman cover, the issue consisted of 192 pages. The articles in that issue were solid including Brian Singer on the 3rd installment of the X-Men film (whoops!), a preview of DC Comics’ Identity Crisis by Brad Metzler/Rags Moralas, and a look at the upcoming run by Superman with art by the aforementioned Jim Lee. The biggest section was entitled the “Mega Movie Preview” and consisted on a series of articles on upcoming comic-related movies such as Spiderman 2, Hellboy, and Batman Begins. The price guide section made up 16% of the total issue and came in at 32 pages.

Wizard 168    October 2005             $5.99

The content breakdown in issue 168 from October of 2005 begins to reveal what I feel is the decline of the quality of Wizard and its price guide in particular. The price increase of a buck per issue affords us 40 fewer pages than the issue selected from 2004. We get another Jim Lee cover of Batman and Robin but an article of the 100 Greatest Cartoons of All Time? I thought I was reading TV Guide for a second. This issue did have its moments, including an interview with Sandman scribe Neil Gaiman and Astonishing X- Buffy writer Josh Whedon. The price guide section made up just 16 of the 152 pages in this copy. That’s only 10.5% of the total magazine! That's a shrinkage of almost 6% from issue 150. (And if you’re a Seinfeld fan, you know what George Costanza said about shrinkage).

Wizard 179    September 2006         $5.99

Issue 179 was just released and has only 127 pages. That’s 25 whole pages less than issue 168 with a price tag of $5.99. Of course, you do get a Wizard that is taller and wider. For the past several years, Wizard has also been on a trend of producing two covers: our copy has a Spider-man mask being held in Peter Parker’s hand by Michael Turner. (Let’s get this straight; Michael Turner produces a cover for the Wizard of a hand holding a mask! Wow, what a complete waste of talent.) The other cover for this issue features Ms. Jessica Alba dressed in her Invisible Girl garb from Fantastic Four 2. But from the angle the photo is taken, you can’t actually make out the FF emblem. You get instead a shot that could pass for anyhing in Cosmo or Seventeen. I presume this is meant to confuse potential buyers that the magazine they are buying is actually Maxim.
This issue includes an interview with comics’ great Samuel L. Jackson. (LOL) There’s an interview with Alan Moore and yet another discussion with Neil Gaiman (whose prolific pace has put out a whopping two issues in the past two years- hence the need for two interviews in October 2005 to September 2006). If the Sam Jackson feature wasn’t your cup of tea, the staff at Wizard also talks to Jon Favreau (at least he’s directing the Iron Man movie).

Wizard spends 15 pages counting down the 50 greatest fights of all time. Now before you get excited…that’s the 50 greatest fights, not the 50 greatest COMIC fights! (Please note: the top five slots of this ridiculous countdown only featured one comic fight: Superman and Batman!)The magazine that was once dedicated to the medium of comics has completed its transformation into something else. It has become…VH1!

The breakdown on this issue is even worse than the previous. The price guide was only 10 pages out of the 127 available. (The “50 Greatest Fights” got 15!) Percentage wise, that’s only 7.8 %. From the first issue we featured to this one, that's a drop of almost half. Back in issue 142, there were 350 title entries. In this month’s copy, a little over 250 title entries made up their price guide.

The Wizard Today

      Another factor to consider is: How about the quality of their price guide? Well, let me answer that. Recently, I picked up a nice run of Teen Titans (Issues 1-36) which is a fairly hot book. The price guide only listed prices for 25 of the issues in the run.  Five of the entries were for the first issue and the various variant covers that were produced for it. The price guide is anemic at best and at worst…incompetent. Don’t just take my word for it- test the Wizard’s price guide for yourself. You won’t be impressed by it.

      The overall content of the Wizard has fallen in quality as well. While the Wizard was never a bastion of diversity of comics or in comic publishers and has always seemed to focus on the mainstream, it has devolved into a mouthpiece of the major comics publishers. If DC and Marvel were merged into a single mega-publisher and needed to print a magazine for their prospective comic books, the magazine they would publish would be the Wizard. Their focus on the mainstream has hurt the independent comics market to the point that it has made it almost impossible for me, as a comic retailer, to focus any real effort on promoting and selling independent comics.
      The most troubling factor in all of this is that I have seen this all before. Wizard has a sister publication that focuses on the collectable card game market, Inquest. For a number of years, the Inquest was the top magazine/price guide on the market for the CCG craze that started with Magic the Gathering. A little over a year ago, the Inquest went on a similar publishing kick in broadening their coverage of pop culture and computer gaming while allowing their price guide’s content and coverage of CCGs to wane. Unlike the situation with the Wizard, Inquest had competition and they quickly exploited Inquest’s publishing blunder. After a few months and a down-spiraling circulation, Inquest tried to return to their previous format. They even lowered their price to only $1.99. As of this date, Inquest has not recovered their market share.
       For me, Wizard is a tool to help market and price back issues. It is also a mildly decent source of comic news. Unlike the situation with the Inquest… there is no alternative to the Wizard nor is there another company ready to jump into the widening gulf of what the public needs and what they’re getting. For better or worse, we’re stuck with the Wizard. In closing, I would like to remind the publishers of the Wizard of the phrase that used to appear on the binding of their publication: “Wizard: The Comics Magazine”.  With the advent of their new wider format, the magazine dedicated to comics can’t even be stored in a comic storage box.

UPDATE 8/8/2006
Recently, I purchased a small comic collection and in it was a copy of Wizard #20 from April 1993. The price guide in this issue was 31 pages out of 196 total pages! That is 31.6 % of the total magazine!!!

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