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The print age of Wizard ends
Monday, January 24, 2011
by John Jackson Miller
As Comics Buyer's Guide reports, Wizard magazine is suspending publication of its print version immediately, turning to a digital format in February.
Wizard came on the scene in the early 1990s with a bang, capturing — and contributing — to the boom period in comics with its attention on new publishers, its monthly price guide, and its high production values. The self-titled "Wizard Age" of comics was bound up tightly with the themes of that era: from hot new creators at Image to comics hot with speculator interest.
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| Wizard copies sold by Diamond, 1998-2006 |
I saw Wizard from an unusual perspective, working as an editor at Krause Publications' trade magazine and later as editorial director of the Comics and Games Division. Comics Buyer's Guide was twenty years old when Wizard came on the scene, and for the years while I was there, Wizard really was our Moby Dick. It needn't have been — our business model as a newsprint shopper's guide was completely different, and many of their advertisers would never have bought into our publications or vice versa. Our readerships were worlds apart. But that didn't stop the corporation from wanting to find ways to compete with it, anyway.
A famous in-house story involved a meeting in the early 1990s in which Krause executives asked the CBG publisher what it would cost to transform the weekly newspaper into something that could compete with Wizard head-to-head. When the publisher provided his estimates of what it cost to produce a single issue of Wizard — from the full-color printing to the paper quality to the comparatively high freelance rates — the room erupted in incredulous laughter from the higher-ups. The production costs were astronomical, compared to what hobby publishers were paying. Krause didn't yet have a single magazine designed fully on computer — my Comics Retailer was the first, in 1994 — and the freelance budget was minuscule by comparison. (CBG, which hits its 40th anniversary in February, would remain a weekly newspaper until the conversion to a monthly magazine with limited color in 2004.)
But while there would be no head-to-head competition, the presence of Wizard did provide a great example of what was possible for a comics magazine, and it definitely caused us to work harder. Many resources were contributed to the comics division that might otherwise not have been available, if not for Wizard's example. It'll be interesting to see how the electronic version fares — but the end of the print publication represents the end of an interesting era for the industry. Best wishes to those involved with the print publication in the future! Read more...
Diamond CEO Steve Geppi had spoken of improvement in the fourth quarter in that end-of-year announcement, and there was a year-to-year increase in the fourth quarter of nearly 2% in dollar sales of comics and trade paperbacks, thanks to a large increase in trade paperback sales over the three-month period. After a few years in which comics periodical sales grew more than trade paperback sales — and several months this year in which trade paperback orders suffered against Watchmen-inflated comparisons from 2009 — the market seems to have returned to the dynamic that helped it in its last recovery, early in the 2000s. Bound edition sales have rebounded — thanks in some part this year to the media-helped success of Walking Dead, Scott Pilgrim, and Kick-Ass — and that has helped the market improve against losses on the periodical side. 
was the top collected edition for the month.
led the top trade paperback and graphic novels for the year, with projected sales of nearly 44,000 copies. The Walking Dead line, along with similarly media-promoted 
, dominated the top-sellers list:
Kick Ass Premium HC
Walking Dead Vol. 11: Fear the Hunters
Scott Pilgrim Vol. 6: Finest Hour
Superman Earth One HC
Scott Pilgrim Vol. 1: Precious Little Life
Walking Dead Vol. 12: Life Among Them
Walking Dead Vol. 2: Miles Behind Us
Walking Dead Vol. 13: Too Far Gone
Scott Pilgrim Vol. 2: Versus the World
