I miss comic book magazines.

I know this is a backwards opinion. In the world of the 24 hour news cycle, endless podcasts, and comic book magazine-style websites such as this one, the idea of a printed and paid-for magazine seems ludicrous.

It is. You’re right. Insert the “100%” emoji right here to make me look hip and young.

I was flipping through a stack of old “Wizard” magazines this weekend. These are from the single digit issues into the teens. The magazines cover the dawn of Image Comics, but also the trends, movies, and fandoms of the day. I couldn’t help but think of all the reasons why I loved these magazines, and why I sometimes wish they’d make a comeback, no matter how out of place they’d be in today’s media landscape.

Seven Reasons Why I Love Comic Book Magazines

1) Those early issues were the early era of “Wizard” goofiness. It was silly, but hadn’t yet turned brutally sophomoric. And while it covered trading cards and toys and TV and movies — and pogs! — it was still mostly comics. It wasn’t for another 50 or 60 issues before movie characters took over the covers and the comic book characters were the alternate covers.

Those early magazines, in particular, represent a golden age for a magazine that would later make more questionable moves….

2) Put aside “Wizard Magazine” for a moment. Think back to “Arena” or “Hero Illustrated” or “Comics Scene.” Whatever the title, there’s a larger thing going on that the web can’t replace.

There’s something about the time capsule of a single issue of a magazine that is appealing. The web is not a collection of things. It’s a scattershot sampling of articles that happen to be at the same site. You can search by topic or creator or event, but you’re not going to see the concurrent events unless there’s a passing reference to them in the text of the article, itself.

These early Wizard issues run up to the breaking of Batman’s back and the uncertain transition of the X-Men comics from the Lee/Liefeld/Silvestri days to what came after. There’s also some Valiant love in there and Spider-Man here and there.

It’s a cross-section of “kewl” comics at the time. It’s what the Direct Market fandom was focused on.

It’s a snapshot in time of a segment of comics culture, bound under one cover.

It’s fun to see the zeitgeist of the moment. What else was hot when Jim Lee was kicking off “WildC.A.T.S”? What else were we talking about when Wolverine or Venom were the flavor of the month? What was the counterpoint to all this? What were the independent books that people talked about at the same time? Was it “Bone”? “Ninja High School”?

Are there obvious connections anywhere in there? Can you see one thing play off the other?

Unless you look up a site on the Internet Archive for a specific date, you won’t get that broad cross-section of concurrent events. The article, itself, will lack context for that, even with the padding of a couple hundred words of background attached to the article so the writer can hit his word count or get some extra SEO juice.

3) Hindsight is 20/20. Seeing anyone make a prediction — even an off-handed aside — is interesting because we can tell if they were correct now that it’s 25 years later. It also makes for great blog fodder.

4) This is a bit on the “nostalgia” side of things, but it bears mentioning. These magazines, from a personal point of view, remind me of how things “felt” in those days.

In the early days of eBay, I bought a large number of early “Marvel Age” comics. I was a stalwart reader of the series from relatively early in my collecting days, but it was still well past issue #50, as I recall. I picked up those back issues I missed out of curiosity. They’re great, but they don’t provide the same nostalgic rush that the issues I picked up on the newsstand do.

There’s nothing wrong with being reminded of how a certain time in your life felt, if you want to remember that. It’s not a specific sight or sound or touch. It’s more of an attitude towards the world combined with a reminder of what else was going on at the time.

You can’t buy that.

5) The pendulum swings back and forth. Something I keep seeing over and over, as I look back at the nearly three decades I’ve followed the comics industry: History repeats itself. It’s not so much a circle as it is a pendulum, rocking back and forth. Things swing too far in one direction before a correction, an over-correction, and then a new swing back.

This is as true in politics as it is in comics. Crossovers were massive until they were overdone, and then they got quiet for a while and then they came back and were huge and got pushed even further. Then, they went so far overboard that a correction came and they got a little smaller, but more frequent. Things change. They go back and forth.

6) Fan interaction. There are no letters columns on the web. There aren’t even forums anymore. There are no fan artists drawing on envelops or making fan art for future Wizard magazine covers.

Those art pieces, in particular, are a fascinating snap shot. A number of future professionals first showed up in those pages. I’m looking right now at a J. Bone Fantastic Four faux Wizard cover from issue #11, for one example. That’s 1992.

7) Finally, the biggest old man comment of them all: Those were simpler times. The comics new cycle didn’t run 24 hours a day. It ran in seven day increments because the “Comics Buyer’s Guide” was weekly. Magazines were monthly and still managed to break news. And the news wasn’t followed by immediate sarcasm and one-liners from the peanut gallery. There was a sense of excitement and joy that gets lost so often today. These magazines, often filled with wide-eyed innocence, are the physical proof of those days.

So, Yeah, Magazines Are Awesome

They haven’t all gone away. Fantagraphics tries to bring back The Comics Journal occasionally. TwoMorrows has a magazine or three these days, though off the top of my head I don’t remember which ones are left. “Comic Shop News” is still going, isn’t it?

It’s just not the same as those magazines from the “good old days” that I used to devour. I miss those.

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