Robserecaps Thirty Two – episode 217 Wizard Magazine
by Joe
After a year and a half off, I had to revisit this. I had been toying with returning to the Rob’s podcast and had been dragging my feet on it. But today’s episode is about Wizard Magazine, which the Rob NEVER says anything kind about. Let’s see if the Rob has softened since February 2021.
- this is coded as episode 218, but there are only 217 episodes of the podcast
- this episode is an Afterschool special, an intervention episode if you will
- Wizard Magazine came as quickly as it left. It was in publication from July 1991 to January 2011. Almost 20 years
- Because of Wizard, comics were treated like stocks and bonds, the value of which determined by a couple of kids in a warehouse in New Jersey
- After a brief intro, the Rob reminisces about his childhood comics, how Stan Lee got the Hulk TV show made leading to the She-Hulk comic and the new Disney Plus show, which he will not be talking about today
- This does get the Rob talking about the 90’s She-Hulk movie that never got made and running through Brigitte Nielsen’s IMDb
- Before we get to Wizard magazine, which the Rob claims he’s avoided talking about until now, he mentions an interview from Comics Interview from 1985 with retailer Bruce Conklin who bragged about pushing people away from reading Neal Adams’s Ms. Mystic
- the Rob HATES this type of gatekeeping, someone in power pushing people away from certain products you may like
- Next, the Rob reads a letter from ‘Franklin’ which the Rob states is hard to read, which states ‘I have a couple of questions that have been bugging me now for most of my life. Why did Wizard magazine want so badly for me to hate you? Was Wizard magazine a big payola scam for Gareb Shamus? I very much need this to be covered on your podcast’
- BUT FIRST, we have to talk about Overstreet Price Guide! An annual publication that told you what your comics were worth. The Rob takes some time here to look up issues of New Mutants at different grades in the most recent Overstreet Price Guide
- By seeing these stats in Overstreet Price Guide yearly, you’d always see your comics going up in price, even if it was just pennies
- 19:20 is our first SNIFF
- At every convention you attend today, all the top retailers still go by Overstreet Price Guide, the industry standard
- the Rob did six or seven covers or posters with Wizard over the years and he never got that original art back, but the Rob doesn’t remember signing anything about it one way or the other
- Wizard started out innocent but became the most amount of hubris of any company on any level. Wizard hurt comics more than any single entity in the history of comics, but their influence was negligible (?)
- Wizard started as a tool to give a more real time price guide but was really all about influence, control and power and would stop at nothing to get these things
- X-Force #5 was coming out when the first issue of Wizard came out so the Rob felt he would owe nothing to Wizard magazine
- “I can go into all the rumors about Wizard, but that would take nine episodes”
- the Chicago Comic-Con that Wizard bought in the late 90’s was the number two comic convention behind San Diego
- By giving you monthly stats on your comics, Wizard was, for the first time in comics history, telling the readers their books were losing money
- The Wizard staff were all college age kids who didn’t know the prior 25 years of comics history so they had to rely on snark for things they didn’t like and praise for the creators who took them out to dinners
- Marketing people and editors at Marvel, DC and Image would SCREAM about the coverage (or lack thereof) in Wizard when Wizard was very good at getting these publishers to outspend each other under the promise of more promotion. BUT, the Rob doesn’t know the actual basis of Wizard’s business, so this is him being careful
- “If I open this up to calls, we’ll be here for hours! We may need to do a part two!”
- Kurt Busiek signed on with the Rob to write Youngblood Year One. When Wizard questioned Busiek’s decision to work with the Rob. This prompted the Rob to call Gareb Shamus with Matt Hawkins & Eric Stevenson (his publishers) in the room, ask him what time he’d be in the office. When Gareb replied “about seven” the Rob replied “Good, my flight will land at six and I’ll be there to kick your ass!” But the Rob was just joking around, ya see
- With hindsight, the Rob sees how he may have overreacted
- Once Jim Lee and the Rob came back to Marvel with Heroes Reborn, Wizard was shaking in their boots since the person they bashed the most was coming to save the publisher they loved the most
- At this time, Wizard hired one of their clowns to follow the Rob around for a day. This clown was very diminishing and disrespectful to the Rob
- A few years after that, at Oakland Comic Con, another Wizard staffer (Clown #2, Johnny Clownface) came up to the Rob, shocked the Rob was there, calling the Rob a cancer in the industry and box office poison to his face, in front of a major retailer!
- Wizard went out of business because it’s snark couldn’t keep up with the internet. Once Wizard couldn’t pick on the original Image crew, Wizard started picking on the Big Two who pulled access
- Most of the Wizard staff, once they closed, moved to DC and continued their terrible practices there
- If you were reading Wizard in those final years, you weren’t buying a magazine, you were buying a pamphlet
- The Rob closes the episodes out these days by reading iTunes reviews, because you know, they matter!
- This review is from a fan, as teenager, was suspended from school for three days for drawing Spider-Man with guns, killing people! And now those very people that suspended him, hired him to paint a mural featuring Deadpool at the same school
- and in closing, the blue check mark next to the Rob’s social media tells you it’s really him and not some grifter. Then, the Rob plugs his WhatNot
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