Since 1991, Wizard Entertainment has kept every fanboy and Boba Fett enthusiast informed of all things comic-related via their publication Wizard. The magazine has served as a literal guide and bible to the geek universe, gracing newsstands with awesome cover art after awesome cover art. Well, as hard as it is to believe, yesterday it was announced that both Wizard and its sister-publication ToyFare would both cease to produce print versions any longer. A sad day indeed.
My father’s 1973 Playboy subscription aside, Wizard helped educate me on the female physique long before I ever understood what a reasonable body mass index was for a living human being. For many of us, it was a publication that proved geek content could be covered in a journalistic and humorous way, while for others it served as a banking guide to which collectors issues should be locked away in vaults.
Well, from the looks of it, we may be seeing Wizard again soon, just not in the way we’re used to. Per Jerry Milani at Wizard World PR:
Wizard Entertainment is ceasing publication of the print magazines Wizard and ToyFare. Wizard World, Inc. will begin production of the online publication “Wizard World” beginning in February. We feel this will allow us to reach an even wider audience in a format that is increasingly popular and more readily accessible. [Newsarama]
For the past several years, Wizard has slowly been shrinking its staff down and replacing longtime writers with freelancers -so hopefully this isn’t all just some gimmick to postpone the inevitable 2012 apocalypse we’ve been hearing about. If they really want to keep up with the times and this shift to strictly digital content is the proverbial tipping of the scales, then hopefully we’ll get the same great content via Wizard‘s new web launch in a couple of weeks. If not, I guess I’ll just keep having to submit these unread, rhetorical questionnaire e-mails to Jack Kirby’s site.
[via Toplessrobot]