Is/was Wizard Magazine full of shit?

Is/was Wizard Magazine full of shit?

Pretty much yeah. They are responsible for the industry crash. But on the other hand they also made a lot of indie comics successful through hyping and pimping them hoping to capitalize on speculators' need for the "next big thing". We wouldn't be reading Valiant in 2017 for instance if not for Wizard.

Wizard was incredibly influential in it's time, and opinions fans still hold, may well be second-hand opinions they got from Wizard.

They were REEEEEEE-ing about the 1990s Spider-Man Clone Saga before it even started, and the owner of Wizard falling out with Rob Liefeld resulted in them turning their readers against him.

what's this about Gareb and Rob?

feels they have a hard on for Kevin Smith whenever they feature him in the mag.

I liked Toyfare better

>feels they have a hard on for Kevin Smith whenever they feature him in the mag.
They would not stop talking about that fat fuck even before he got into comics. Then after he wrote Daredevil that was it, they became Wizard: The Guide to Comics and Kevin Smith

90s Wizard Magazine was phenomenal. 2000s Wizard Magazine WAS shit.

>They are responsible for the industry crash.

This has no basis in reality.

>This has no basis in reality.
They manipulated the collectors market by artificially inflating values, there were other factors that caused it, but to look at it another way it would not have happened if Wizard never existed.

>it would not have happened if Wizard never existed

I'm old enough to have been around the industry on a retailer level back then. Wizard Magazine were 100% uninvolved in the crash.

Image Comics on the other hand...

Yeah but everyone was doing it than but it was mostly retailers. the Overstreet guide was there Wizard was more of a symptom than anything else.

Some of it. When they were given access to movie sets they were basically as bad as clickbait sites of today. They also gave way too much coverage to, and de facto created, the god awful mainstream bad girl genre that quite literally spread like cancer and destroyed established female characters and cemented in a true dark age for writing. Not even saying this as some white knight or whatever, but it was so fucking frustrating seeing all of that happen to women characters that I read for decades prior.

But Jim McLaughlin was basically the heart and soul of decent nerd fandom opinion, so I respect the fact that he was there for so long and held such sway with the way things were written. And they were absolutely ruthless with 90s Spider-Man, which rivals today's rudderless editorial direction in so many titles. Plus they gave indies a generously disproportionate amount of coverage in page count per issue compared to what their actual sales figures were versus the bigger companies. Akiko, Usagi, Groo, Mage, Grendel, Cerebus, etc were really well spotlighted.

And the drawing tutorials from industry pros was welcomed, can't forget that. I still have the Mike Mignola one and glance at it pretty often to refresh my inspiration for drawing.

Toyfare > InQuest >>>> Wizard

TF was shit after Zach Malamute left

something that bugs me for a long time.

is their anti-france (any opportunity to use how france and the french suck, they will use it no matter how contrived) thing a running gag or they actually hate the french?

>Jim McLaughlin

I dropped the magazine when he stopped doing the letters section.

...

It's just a joke, like France's military track record in modern history.

Frank told me it was a Bible written by the Devil!

Robot Chicken: The Comic

>InQuest

I just remembered Inquest was a thing, holy shit.

Post InQuest covers
My nostalgia is demanding it.

I think all the big publishers were equally to blame, people really give it to Image hard but Marvel had just as many if not more cover gimmicks and DC had the Death of Superman. But these guys were just trying to make a buck, they just made the product, the only immoral thing I think they did was willfully putting "#1 FIRST COLLECTORS ITEM ISSUE" on books that shipped hundreds of thousands of copies.

The most blame I think lies in the hands of the speculators... the suckers who drove the whole boom. The publishers and the price guides egged it on but it's not really any of their fault

Well most of the writers from Robot Chicken came from TTT.

>google Inquest cover
>first result
>I HAD THAT ONE HOLY SHIT

Nigga, how the fuck did I forget about Inquest? I need to dig those out from wherever they are.

What's even weirder is that InQuest lasted until like 10 years ago.

I stopped buying when I stopped playing Magic, some 15 years ago. Me and a friend used to share a copy, he bought it one month and I the next. Fun times.

It was really just a perfect storm that created the 90s comics boom and crash. The Batman movie changing the public's perception of Batman away from the Adam West show, the first comics starting to sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars causing the speculators that inflated the numbers, etc. It was interesting to live through (I'M OLD) but I wouldn't want it to happen again.

What went wrong?

>all this talk of InQuest

I miss that magazine. It helped me really get into Magic and the like.

This.

I used to read everything cover to cover in Wizard back in the 90s. In the 00s when I got back into comics again I picked up a few issues and thought it was crap and then the mag died

Wizard was fun until when your a teenager boy living in the 90's early 00's, until you got a little older and realize that it was just a promotional tool for whatever was new and popular. They would just slober over any new movie/ TV show.

>It was really just a perfect storm that created the 90s comics boom and crash

People also forget that there was a massive markup on comic books which briefly padded publisher pockets – until the cost of paper skyrocketed almost overnight in the early 90s erasing that margin. Publishers had to hold off on passing the hurt to the consumer for at least a while.

One of the creators of Robot Chicken used to work at Wizard and Toyfare.

>New Wildcats

11 years later still nothing beyond issue 1.

Depends on which part of it. On average they produced a lot of fluff articles or articles with dubious knowledge, but there was a time during the 90's where they had some insightful articles and comments. Of course then it got drowned out by the shill articles and stuff and then it turned into a hollow version of itself by the late 00's when they tried to go upscale.

>But Jim McLaughlin was basically the heart and soul of decent nerd fandom opinion, so I respect the fact that he was there for so long and held such sway with the way things were written.

Yeah to his credit he actually sometimes went against what the rest of the magazine was plugging or what not.

>And they were absolutely ruthless with 90s Spider-Man, which rivals today's rudderless editorial direction in so many titles.

90's Wizard would've eviscerated Marvel for One More Day, among other things.

> Plus they gave indies a generously disproportionate amount of coverage in page count per issue compared to what their actual sales figures were versus the bigger companies. Akiko, Usagi, Groo, Mage, Grendel, Cerebus, etc were really well spotlighted.

Yeah, I also remembered they used to run Palmer's Picks in the magazine up until Tom Palmer Jr took an editorial position with Toyfare or something. I used to not read it when I was a kid but when I got older and was still reading Wizard I looked through it to see the indie titles Palmer recommended.

I dropped the magazine long before he left, but I have to admit he was the best of the letter column guys. The guys before him (I think one was Doug Goldstein, who went on to work on Toyfare and Robot Chicken) were okay. I mean all I remember about Goldstein was he was the guy who claimed Iron Man could beat the X-Men.

I think least favorite might've been the guy who was answering letters before Wizard turned into a halfassed Maxim. He was sometimes funny but sometimes he came off a bit too tryhard. I forget his name at the moment.

Wizard was good from the beginning to around 1998/1999.

Around 1998/1999 they started their downward spiral to being worthless hacks and shills: they started shilling Marvel non-stop and shitting on DC, mercilessly in terms of Marvel doing no wrong and DC doing no right.

They also started shilling their own failed comic line (Black Bull) and made some arrogant fuck ups like running an ad for a copyright infringing Sailor Moon/Dragon Ball Z hentai game and then attacking everyone who called them out on letting it slip through their radar. Not to mention shilling Joe Maduria and Jason Scott Cambell's garbage comics (especially Maduria's garbage).