The Four Color Media Monitor

The COO of Wizard magazine, that horrid tabloid of the comics world, has been let off. I wonder if this signals the coming end of what was a really a terrible, favoratist monthly?

The Beat is saying:

[Fred] Pierce was not well liked by many ex-Wizard staffers, as Sean T. Collins shows by breaking into an Ewok-style celebratory “yub nub” at the news.

Everyone knows that magazine publishing isn’t exactly a huge growth industry these days, but an observer can’t help but think that things must be very dire at Wizard World for a fixture like Pierce to be let go.

All this just obscures the more important point, that Wizard was tasteless and did a grave disservice to the industry it supposedly represented. In the words of a commentor on the Newsarama blog:

Reading Wizard in the last couple of years made me feel like an utter moron: horrible articles, tasteless bathroom humor, and those stupid word balloon captions filled the rag.

The only good thing was the price guide, but then Wizard ruined that too by touting “Graded Books” and slabbing everything for higher values. Geez, whatever happened to collecting comics as a fun hobby?

They've been that way for many years now, possibly ever since the mid-90s, and some of their coverage had traces of sexism at times too. More recently, they even apologized for Marvel's assault on the Spider-Marriage. If they're facing the possiblity of going out of business, they'll be no loss. Comic books deserve much better than Wizard.

Labels: msm propaganda