I’ve spent a day or two thinking about what I would say about Chicago Comic Con 2010.
Avatar co-founder William Christensen and I have known Gareb, his family, and the original staff since the earliest days of Wizard the magazine. I first noticed the magazine with Gareb and Co. sitting behind a folding table in a small room with a color photocopy of the McFarlane Spider-Man cover of Wizard #1 at a (now defunct distributor) Capital City retailer trade show in 1989. And I introduced myself to Gareb, his father, and longtime Wizard EIC Pat McCallum standing in line at a US premiere of Batman (the Keaton/Nicholson version) later that year.
In the two decades since then, Wizard has almost always been a polarizing presence in the comics industry. There are early Wizard employees whom I consider friends and have a great deal of respect for, who may respond to this piece with other perspectives. I respect that, and am well aware that I don’t know everything there is to know about the Wizard era.
But there is an aspect to the public conversation about Wizard that has never sat well with me — On the one hand, there is the public Wizard who was wildly successful, went on to be perceived as a symbol for what went wrong with 90’s comics, and then transmogrified into a convention organizer for wrestlers and geek movie stars. On the other hand, there is the Wizard who sent flowers to my mother’s funeral when they barely knew me as a guy who liked to write about Jack Kirby and cool indy books. Thinking about that just now as I’m typing this, I’m smiling about an early phone conversation where Gareb had asked me what was hot at the moment and I’d ignored sales trends and responded with an explanation of the merits of Nexus and Steve Rude.
I once told William that I thought Gareb would be just as happy publishing Car and Driver as he was Wizard. I meant it as a criticism, but in an era during which catering to niche nerdery is becoming bizarrely valuable, that sounds a lot less like disinterest than it does a knack for publishing geek information porn.
Bringing this full circle, I’m a bit disappointed at the buzz propagating this year that Wizard no longer cares about comics, which I think is a mistaken impression. There has long been internet skuttlebutt about the rift between the Big Two and Wizard, and the apparent preemptive counter-programming regarding guests at NYCC that I saw from Marvel on twitter last week as Chicago was about to get underway would seem to serve as the latest reminder that Marvel and Wizard are on the outs. My personal opinion is that this is a lot less about one individual’s lack of public advocacy for comics than it is about increasingly-gigantic media companies like Time-Warner and Disney exacting control over their increasingly-important geek culture images.
Make no mistake, NYCC and C2E2 organizers Reed Exhibitions are doing a great job with their entries into the comics industry (C2E2 was a hugely successful show for Avatar, contrary to the general news meme that the launch of the show underperformed), but conventions are far more important to the growth of the industry than people generally realize right now, and competition in this area serves everyone.
I think the creators on the ground are the first to realize this, and it was interesting to see a few major fan-favorites in artist’s alley and elsewhere who might otherwise have been ensconced inside the Marvel or DC cocoons.
Obviously I’m biased, but this year’s Chicago Con was a lot of fun for me — I talked to a lot of fans, bought a lot of comics (I’m currently a Golden Age DC guy, for the record), watched William work out deals with a lot of creators, and had zero time to consider which other publishers did or didn’t show up.
