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Post by G on Feb 28, 2009 11:47:14 GMT -5
No doubt it seems 2009 is the year comics along with the rest of the United States, faces a harsh reality. It's been pretty easy to tell that kids and teenagers from this generation are not into comics the way previous generations was and the comics market has been dealing with that. But has it come to the point where the economy has become so bad that even adults and long time collectors have dropped from the market? Will they come back when times finally get better? www.comicsreporter.com/index.php/more_major_firings_at_wizard_today/ |
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AC
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Post by AC on Apr 16, 2009 2:35:26 GMT -5
They've also recently dumped their Anime Insider magazine.
Hate to see people losing their jobs, but, to be honest... for the industry in the long term, a little less "Wizard" may be a good thing.
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Post by G on Apr 16, 2009 9:03:06 GMT -5
I occasionally would like to pick up a Wizard just to see what they were ranting about and it did seem for awhile there that I would actually dig like 1 out of every 3 issues I bought. The other 2 would be so-so, a brief eh moment where it was worth the time to scan through it but not much more.
Then Wizard just became less and less about comics and more and more about Hollywood and that is when I think it became a real piece of shit. I was going to create a thread about Wizard, but this seems as good as any. The last issue of Wizard I have is from September 2007 and I was just looking at it the other day.
It was one article after another about Movies and Comic TV shows. You know, they used to have it where they would devote a small section to movies and tv and that was fine, but now it seemed like they wanted a piece of the Entertainment section maybe hoping to gain some Entertain Tonight geeks or E! geek crowds who happened to dig Sci-Fi and Comic movies.
The only article I found a bit telling was a Michael Turner article discussing his cancer. Now that he is gone it seems surreal to read it again.
It used to be that Wizard was most strictly about comics and comics characters, comic stories, comic writers and comic artist and books that were hot and books that are not and a price guide. Oh yes, they did have a 5-15 page area about comic movies and tv shows. But it was a side journey. The last I looked, it was THE journey.
I think Wizard alienated most of its pure comic fans. If they just stuck to comics, I think they could have maintained the 1 out of every 3 was a pretty good magazine. And damn, if I could have done that well with it and felt the other 2 were so-so, I think I could have kept picking them up. But Im just tired of the big screen little screen hype. Wizard is aimed now at 13 yr old comic movie geeks.
They can die for all I care now.
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Post by cyberstrike on Apr 20, 2009 14:51:25 GMT -5
I think one of the things that has hurt Wizard in the last few years has been the "bias" towards Marvel and DC (in particularly Marvel) over Image, Dark Horse, and the indy publishers. I also agree they seemed to be more focused on comic books movies and TV shows and not comic books anymore, which is mistake I mean do we need another 10 page article on Star Wars, Star Trek, Heroes, Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Angel, Lost, Battlestar Galactica, and every other sci-fi show on TV?
Also a lot of people who have worked there have made a lot of allegations of how horrible it was to work there. Also the guy running Wizard has made a lot of bad investments in other companies like a an MMA promotion that went under after losing millions of dollars.
Then again a lot of magazines and newspapers blame the internet for their declining readership and low ad sales so either they're become an online source or they go out of business. There are lot of a magazines are going to the way of either internet exclusives like Famous Monsters of Filmland which has been in a copyright/trademark legal limbo mess for years when the plaintiff with the stronger case, Phil Kim, has made it crystal clear he isn't planning on publishing a monthly magazine (should he win the case all he's won is injunction against the other guy, scum bag Ray Ferry) but wants FM to be a horror, sci-fi, and fantasy website more than a magazine when you consider some of the people who read FM when they were kids (Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, Stephen King, and Peter Jackson just to name a few) this shows where media heading.
Starlog the granddaddy of sci-fi mags have announced that they will be an online exclusive because the magazine just wasn't making money anymore.
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Post by G on Apr 21, 2009 15:10:13 GMT -5
Well after seeming to be Image bias forever, I would agree with your Marvel and DC bias. And then the bias was always towards the endless multi-chapter grand crossover epics. They seemed to have dissected the same stuff (who is likely to die?, who's existence will be severely altered? who will be the surprise role player in the series?) How many times can you do an article like that? They seemed to never run out of those kind of articles. And yes, their concentration on anything Mega Superstar and nothing that is not is horrid. By comparison, CBG has become a much better publication for fans of comics and not movie, tv and mega-series hype!
But yes it is also true that print is on the outs. And I think it is very sad. Nothing more enjoyable to me than to sit down with a good newspaper or magazine and read away. I don't always want or can read in front of a computer. As much as I spend too much time in front of one in the 1st place, it's good for me to get away from it from time to time and one of the easier ways is print media which is now becoming scarce for good material. I don't want everything to go away and only be accessible by computer. To be honest, if my favorite magazines became accessible only via computer, I doubt I will visit.
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Wrecks
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Post by Wrecks on Jan 7, 2010 20:09:15 GMT -5
And as we all know by now. The Wizard Forum got shut down.
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Post by defiant1 on Jan 8, 2010 19:01:04 GMT -5
And as we all know by now. The Wizard Forum got shut down. Nah! I'd never seen it, so that's news to me that they had one. Defiant1 |
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Wrecks
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Post by Wrecks on Jan 9, 2010 2:03:07 GMT -5
And as we all know by now. The Wizard Forum got shut down. Nah! I'd never seen it, so that's news to me that they had one. Defiant1 You didn't? Heck it was big news when it got shut down. I think it shut down roughly 2 months after InvestComics Forum got started. And they didn't even tell anybody a damn thing when they did it. |
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Post by G on Jan 9, 2010 10:23:14 GMT -5
Nah! I'd never seen it, so that's news to me that they had one. Defiant1 You didn't? Heck it was big news when it got shut down. I think it shut down roughly 2 months after InvestComics Forum got started. And they didn't even tell anybody a damn thing when they did it. I didn't know either. I'd better the forum is a lot like the magazine. Full of stuff I don't want to know. It's looking like Wizard as a whole is just about kaput. Yet another bad sign.... |
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Wrecks
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Post by Wrecks on Jan 9, 2010 18:37:13 GMT -5
Nah, actually the forum had some good people on it. And to be honest, the last few times I've bought a Wizard issue, I never even bothered to take them out of the packages.
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