Wizard Magazine: The Con That Fooled an Entire Generation

0:00 Comics have been a staple of pop culture for the last 100 years. This beloved art form reached its commercial pinnacle in the early 1990s. In the wake of this success, one magazine chronicled this niche hobby that for a brief moment in time rose to the mainstream. And then that same magazine almost destroyed everything overnight. I'm Dave Baker and this is the rise and fall of Wizard Magazine. >> [music] [music]

0:52 >> Once upon a time, a comic book cost a dime and they were bought and read almost exclusively by youngsters. >> It's hard to imagine, but at one point in time, comics weren't just relegated to comic book stores and specialty shops and to shelves in the back of a Barnes & Noble like they are today. They were out in the world in grocery stores, in convenience stores, and mostly just those two places. But even so, that was a lot. Millions of books were sold through what's now called the newsstand distribution network. Ever been in line to check out and seen a copy of Archie or a stray dog-eared copy of Batman? You've witnessed the magic of newsstand distribution, my friend. But this means of distributing comics, well, it was starting to wane. And a new side

1:37 industry of specialty shops started to pop up. Mom-and-pop operations that bought comics directly through separate distributors on a non-returnable basis. But how were you supposed to keep track of what books were good and what artists were important? What characters were being reinvented with chains and spikes and demon backstories? Remember, it was the '90s. Enter Wizard Magazine, the square-bound periodical that had the answer to all those questions and more. Wizard was published by this guy, Gareb Shamus. Gareb Seth Shamus was born on December 23rd, 1968. He wound up the second oldest of four brothers, and four boys going up through the 1970s and 1980s naturally meant that they had a

2:23 keen interest in the funny pages, and specifically superheroes. Shamus loved Spider-Man and Batman, and at a young age he gravitated to more mature artists like Frank Miller or Todd McFarlane. The Shamus brothers' love of comic books convinced their parents to open a shop in Nanuet, New York called The Wizard of Cards and Comics. And after Shamus graduated from college at Albany SUNY with a BA in economics and a minor in art, he set about creating a newsletter for his parents' shop's customers. He spoke about the inspiration for starting the newsletter on the Wizard's podcast. >> And the newsletter just took off like we were giving it away for free. We'd print it through the copy machine, give it out to all the customers, and then we noticed that the the fulfillment box,

3:09 like the advanced order box that we would keep for people, the subscriptions basically went through the roof. I mean, we started selling two, three, five, 10 times the number of comic books. >> His newsletter became known as Wizard, The Guide to Comics, and it proved to be a big hit. Anyone who came into his parents' shop wanted a copy, and since many of the customers were pretty knowledgeable about comic books, Shamus would often, you know, tap them to write features and articles. In July of 1991, just a year after starting it, he launched the magazine with the far cleaner title, Wizard. It quickly became a go-to resource for anyone who took comic books seriously. Wizard was a behemoth in those early years and quickly began regularly selling over for copies a month. Before the internet was in everyone's homes, Wizard was the

3:55 place where people could go to learn about niche interests and toys and anime and comics and you name it. However, comic books were easily the focal point. Wizard would publish interviews with writers and artists and even China spotlight on lesser-known titles published by newcomers like Image or you know, Valiant or I don't know, any number of publishers that showed up with $5 and a long box full of books. And it was here [music] that this slippery slope would appear. It's hard to imagine that now, but back in the day, Wizard was kind of the only place to find out about info of what was happening in the comics market. The internet just wasn't what it is today. Social media wasn't a thing and fan forums were you know, you just didn't want to go there. Trust me. Almost overnight, this

4:42 random guy became the most powerful person in the entire comics industry. If he or his staff liked you, your book was going to sell. If they didn't, your life was going to become a lot more complicated. And the people who realized that they needed to play the game first won big. Rob Liefeld, Todd McFarlane and the other Image founders quickly realized that if they paid Wizard for ad space about their new books, they'd quadruple their print runs. Same thing for Valiant. So many copies of Turock, Solar Man of the Atom and Bloodshot were sold by this exact strategy. Look, I'm not going to say that it was literally pay to play, but you know, pay for a big splashy ad and get a coincidental feature in the magazine and

5:27 then watch your subscriber numbers balloon. It was just the natural outcome of one hand washing the other. But who cares about that? Wizard encouraged readers to participate in their monthly offerings by sending in fan art and submitting to polls. It was fun. You got to see people in cosplay way before that was a thing at conventions. Well, not literally way before. Look, I know I know Forry Ackerman in the '30s. I get it. Yes, but like come on. Don't type in the comments. Or maybe do type in the comments. I don't know. Wizard provided a space to connect with other fans in a time when that was just it felt like an impossibility. Wizard was the best-kept secret in the entire industry and the thing that might undo everything in comics. But we'll get to that in a minute. Wizard proved so

6:12 successful that Gareb Shamus was able to launch other titles like Fun Fare, a magazine that covered the toy industry, and Toy Fare, a magazine that specifically covered action figures. You've got to respect this guy. He's just some dork who lucked into being at the right place at the right time. But I don't know. I really respect the way he has this business acumen for compartmentalization and R&D testing and then deploying something that from the outside would seem like it would never work. Like a magazine about CCGs in the '90s? No mainstream magazine distributor would have taken that on. It would just have been seen as too niche. But Shamus was like, "I don't know. Let's try it and see what happens." And that ability to embrace possibility is really cool. He's got an eye for things and he hired a lot of really interesting people to work at Wizard and those other

6:59 magazines. People who had a sense of humor and perspective on the material. Palmers Picks. Palmers Picks is an indie comic spotlight column that changed the way a lot of people read. It did more good than almost anything else in this period of comics history. It's something that's looked back on very fondly today, especially by me. I found a lot of really cool stuff from that column. Need more proof? Check out this behind-the-scenes office tour video made for the crew back in the day. Does this feel like you're part of a bro-fest barbecue cookout? Yeah. It it does. And are there too many popped collar Abercrombie & Fitch shirts? Also, yeah. But come on. Are you really going to tell me you wouldn't want to work there? I would. I

7:45 want to hang out, guys. Let's hang out. Unfortunately, Wizard's most influential section would also play a part in almost bringing down the entire comic industry. According the speculators. In the back of every issue of Wizard was a price guide where a collectors could figure out how much their issues could sell for. Now, was this the first price guide? Of course not. But, the Wizard price guide coupled with the general culture of flipping books and promoting the idea that comics were more collectible than a piece of art to experience, well, it caught up with everyone eventually. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, people believed that they could retire off of comic books. Like fully believed this. They were going to buy hundreds of copies of Deathmate number one and in 40

8:32 years, cash in. Obviously, that's just not going to happen. But, you couldn't tell anyone in 1993 any different. They were buying loads and loads and loads of books. So much so that Jim Lee's adjective-less X-Men number one sold 8 million copies. Wizard, along with plenty of other news outlets, offered price guides to give readers an idea of how much some of these newly released issues might be worth someday. Or right now, someone could buy an issue of Spider-Man for a couple bucks and sell it to someone else for a lot more because of the belief that it would someday be worth a fortune. Comic book publishers played into the speculator market by releasing variant covers. Certain issues would have variants where the cover would be,

9:19 you know, holographic or foil stamped or glow-in-the-dark. These variants would have even fewer copies released, making them even more in speculators' eyes valuable. Honestly, it's the same thing that we've looped back to in the industry right now. It's great. We love it. Please buy my books. Like, you know, like, please, you know, just please buy my books. Please. Please. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Please don't make me reissue these books with 45 different covers, you know? Also, maybe go check out our Patreon. Another way publishers fed into this was by, you know, releasing event storylines. [music] This is why in the early '90s you got brought things like The Death of Superman or Batman: Knightfall, you know, the one where Bane breaks Batman's

10:04 back. >> The Man of Steel has proven to be as vulnerable as the mere mortals who've looked up to him for more than half a century. Superman died Wednesday. Liz Krieger Agnew reports on a world without the first superhero. >> I'm saddened and disappointed by it. I feel like the uh what they're going to do now is probably uh bring him back in a sort of like a um more modern, little less uh interesting version. >> You want to guess who was front and center drumming up hype, milking reader interest, and generating lots of numbers, maybe a little inflated numbers for these books? You guessed it. Our boy Garib Cheemas and Wizard Magazine. After the smash success of Death of Superman and Knightfall, every other summer event, and indie company crossover, or Image Death Rattle, was

10:51 going to be touted as the next Death of Superman for like 5 years afterwards. Look, is that really true? No, probably not, but my god, did it feel that way. And Wizard was at the epicenter of just marketing these big books over and over and over and over again and trying to get as many 12-year-olds to give their hard-earned dollars as possible. The comic book industry effectively became its own mini stock market thanks to these various business practices. People could trade issues based on unfounded knowledge of what books would be worth years from now. It didn't take long for that bubble to burst. How many times can you say the universe is going to end, a change, or a character's going to die, only for that to be walked back? How many times can you say this book is going to be worth millions of dollars, only for it to not be, and then get

11:38 somebody to buy the next project you've been touting as the thing that's going to be worth millions of dollars? You know you're up a creek without a paddle when Marvel Comics declares bankruptcy because they couldn't cut their print runs to small enough fast enough. The speculator boom came crashing down at the beginning of 1993. Publishers cranking out over 100,000 copies of one issue soon found that they couldn't move anywhere near that number with the comic book sales plummeting as much as 70%. And the effects were devastating. Numerous comic book stores closed. Publishers like Eclipse and Malibu shuttered while Valiant Comics had to be acquired by Acclaim Entertainment in 1994 just to stay afloat. And one of the biggest behemoths of all, Marvel, declared bankruptcy in 1996. Marvel Comics stayed afloat partially by

12:23 licensing out their characters to movie studios. So, Spider-Man went to Sony while the likes of the X-Men and the Fantastic Four went to 20th Century Fox. Wizard was not the only culprit in all of this, not by a long shot, but they were a key contributing factor. They promoted and arguably cemented the speculator culture that still exists to this day. They inflated comic book hype and value and worth, but that's just doing business, right? Yeah, I guess. But they always chased the collector's money, never spent real resources developing readers. Look at all the good that Palmer's Picks did. And they never launched a magazine talking about art comics or even just non-superhero comics. There's so much potential in what Gareb Shamus and Wizard did. And the highs, man, they

13:09 were so high. But the lows were pretty dark. Oh, but wait. There's more. What's Gareb Shamus been doing since all of this? Well, by the mid-1990s, he wanted to get into another way to upend the way comic book fans interacted with one another. In 1997, he purchased the rights to Chicago Comic Con, which had already been running for about 25 years and wasn't particularly a huge money maker. Conventions weren't all the rage back in the '90s that they are today. They were for the hardest core of fans, and Sheamus, he had a vision of how to reinvent them. He saw something that nobody else could see. The same way that Sheamus encouraged fans to send in artwork to Wizard, he encouraged people to dress up for

13:54 Chicago Comic Con, with the best costumes getting featured in Wizard magazine itself. This was long before the term cosplay was common parlance, and it worked. People suddenly started showing up and dressing as superheroes and other pop culture figures. Sheamus effectively turned the event into one big party for Wizard magazine, and even though the convention had been steadily losing money in the years leading up to its purchase, it quickly turned around. Within a year, Wizard magazine went from having a few thousand guests to 25,000. In addition to encouraging people to dress up, Sheamus also emphasized these conventions potential for fans to connect with artists. In years prior, cons were glorified flea markets where people could sell and buy various types of comics. Thanks to the various

14:40 connections Sheamus had made in the entertainment sphere, Wizard World branded conventions became wildly popular and kind of the template for the modern convention. Film and video game studios started coming to promote their upcoming releases, and sections were carved out for people to play tabletop games together. Suddenly, Comic Cons became more about the community than buying comics. Gareb Sheamus realized that there was money to be made and a fandom to cultivate. The only problem is, just like the comics market, he kind of milked the Wizard World circuit dry. I can remember going to my first Wizard World and them not even handing out badges because they were so financially on the rocks that they were just giving out those little green wrist thingies, you know, that you get at like county fairs? It's pretty low rent. There's a lot of positives and a lot of negatives to how

15:26 conventions have both improved and deteriorated in the decades since Sheamus brought the Wizard World Convention Circuit to the fore. I have mixed feelings about it. I think it's fun to see the circus. I think it's fun to see Brent Spiner hitting on someone in line for the restrooms or whatever. That's a joke. I've never seen Brent Spiner uh do anything untoward at any of these shows. He's He's never done anything weird except that one year I was at Phoenix Comic Con and he was trying to flirt with a girl who was at his booth and he was like uh I'm Data from Star Trek Next Generation and she was like what's that? Amazing. I loved it. The current landscape of cons are largely run by mega corporations that have an incentive to prioritize the bottom line.

16:13 They're there to make money. They have to milk the Luke Skywalkers and the Terminators and the Captain Americas for that money. And comics often get pushed to the side. And look, I get it, but also it's never going to grow if it's not fostered. The culture of comics needs to be fostered. But back to the point at hand, Gareb Sheamus didn't just change the comic industry but the entertainment world as a whole. And while Wizard had its charms, there was a far shadier side happening behind the scenes. In the late '90s and early 2000s, Wizard was still chugging along. As part of Wizard Entertainment, Sheamus continued acquiring different cons and at its peak, there were 25 conventions all within the Wizard World umbrella. Wizard's reputation was starting to sour

16:59 for its role in the comic book bubble bursting. And in 2001, Frank Miller, whom if you'll recall was one of Sheamus's favorite writers, called out Wizard magazine when he accepted that year's Harvey Award at the Pittsburgh Comic Con. Miller compared Wizard to a {quote} tapeworm and elaborated by comparing it to, quote, a Bible written by Satan. He concluded his speech by calling Wizard a, quote, tree killer which regularly cheapens and poisons our field before tearing apart an issue of Wizard and throwing it in the trash. Sheamus responded to Miller's critiques by saying, "I always have to question where people are coming from. I see you Frank all the time at shows and conventions and he's never expressed that opinion in person. If you've got a

17:45 problem, tell me and we can fix it. If you don't ever tell me, then what am I supposed to do about it? I just don't know where it comes from, which is just such a disingenuous way of trying to come off as poor little guy." Frank Miller never said anything to me personally. It's just such a weird way to brush off Frank's significant critiques. Over time, Wizard slowly stopped focusing exclusively on comics and more and more leaned into the pop culture and general entertain- -ment news. It was harder to find interviews with cool up-and-coming creators and there was just more stuff about the latest Joss Whedon show or Halle Berry's Catwoman. Wizard also faced the same existential crisis every magazine and newspaper had to in the early 2000s. This is when the

18:31 internet began to become more prevalent and outlets they had to make a choice. Adapt or die. Wizard chose the latter. Wizard was incredibly late to the game in adapting to a digital version readily This is the case across all the magazines in Sheamus's wheelhouse and they all met similar fates. InQuest Gamer, which published articles about the collectible card games sphere, shuttered in 2007. Anime Insider, Sheamus's anime and manga arm, shut down operations in 2009. And finally, in 2011, Wizard ended once and for all due to not being able to profit as much off of the online advertising models and [music] massive turnover. A lot of firings took place in those last few years, and that meant Wizard lost a lot

19:17 of connections. Gareb Shamus officially stepped away from Wizard World by the end of 2011. In 2016, a different Shamus made headlines when Gareb's brother, Steven, was fired from Wizard World and sued for abusing his position to misappropriate funds. The suit read, "For many years, defendant Shamus illicitly obtained autographs and other memorabilia from the celebrities retained by Wizard World and sold them for his own benefit and that of his confederates." Indeed, Shamus often negotiated money-losing deals for Wizard World in order to gain access to celebrities whom he could exploit for his own enrichment. Defendant Shamus thus diverted substantial funds and resources, all generated and paid for by Wizard World, to himself and his co-conspirators. 10

20:04 John Does were mentioned in the filing as aiding and abetting Steven Shamus during this alleged scam, although they were never named. The suit was eventually settled out of court, and Steven landed back on his feet by founding a new venture with Gareb called Ace Universe. Like Wizard, Ace is in charge of a bunch of different Comic-Cons around the US and Canada. So sketchy. It's so sketchy that they did this together. However, Ace differentiated itself by creating a {quote} immersive experience, whatever that is, and by hosting cons in arenas rather than convention centers. >> We didn't just launch the event, we launched the company this weekend, and we were able to do it with the most extraordinary celebrities, extraordinary

20:50 fans and artists and writers, [music] and the best dealers that we have here. >> Who in their right mind would work with these dudes? Well, literally everyone, actually. Here's a local news broadcast posted to Gareb Shamus's personal YouTube account, which is just so funny to me. It's just local news and promo pieces that feature him or whatever. That's fine. He can do that. But for some reason, there's not one, but two distinct YouTube channels that are called Gareb Shamus, which means that he got locked out of one and couldn't remember the password and then just decided to start another one. Amazing. My favorite video is is this one where a woman who obviously doesn't care about what's happening is interviewing him, but the minute he

21:37 starts to like talk about the guests and the people that are going to be at this convention, they just immediately cut away from his face. They're just like, "Nobody wants to see this guy. Quick, show the B-roll of the celebrities." Gareb Shamus has basically become an entrepreneur with his hands in all sort of pots since his wizard days. As Wizard was slowly dying, he co-founded and became CEO of International Fight League Inc., which helped bring MMA to the masses or at least tried to, but that was a relatively short-lived endeavor as Shamus founded it in 2006 and then it folded in 2008. Shamus also got into painting in the early 2010s where he'd create a piece by dripping one drop of paint at a time to create a unique pattern of texture on a canvas. He was profiled in Forbes. "Everything I paint

22:24 is grounded in some of my life experience and they're never flat or stand still much like many people's life experiences." What does that mean? Those are just words strung together in a loose kind of impression of a sentence. It's awful. I'm not going to lie though, I would literally give just about anything to see behind the scenes footage of him painting these. Like I I mean I just want to be in the room while he's like slowly dripping paint on these canvases. I would trade my personalized Steve Ditko letters in exchange for a 4-hour uncut reel of Gareb Shamus meticulously putting drops of paint or sand or whatever on one of these canvases. I need it. I need it so badly. I need to see him try and be creative. In 2021,

23:10 Gareb Shamus embarked on an endeavor that's the total antithesis of art. NFTs. He launched a Web3 studio that produces mobile-first NFT comic books. Listening to him describe the benefits of this project is nothing short of super depressing. How many times do you see characters, and I've been to countless movies or TV shows or countless comic books, where I'm like, "Oh, I could have done a better job if the character only did this, if the character only did that." For the first time, fans, users, and the community, the NFT owners, will now have a say in how that goes. Horrible idea. Just the worst idea. Sounds like Gareb Shamus could have just made a choose-your-own-adventure book and been just as happy. I don't even need to say how bad this is, right? Like, we can all just agree that this is

23:56 a dumb move, right? Gareb Shamus being involved over speculating on the price of something that's largely worthless. Where could this have come from? Huh? Amazing. Intentionally or not, it seems like Gareb Shamus is still up to his old tricks. It might be unfair to say that Wizard was solely responsible for the comic book speculation bubble. If anything, it was just a symptom of a larger issue. What's there to take from the story of Gareb Shamus? Well, calling this story the rise and fall of Gareb Shamus may be a little bit of a misnomer. He's still extremely wealthy and kind of influential. So, he hasn't exactly fallen in the traditional sense, but he's definitely fallen from what he could have been. Wizard magazine was really cool at first. It helped bring

24:44 comic books to the mainstream while also promoting the methodology of speculation, which nearly tanked the entire industry. And that's really been Shamus's MO over the years. He's gotten into comic books before they were big and helped bring them to the mainstream before dipping out. He made Comic Cons more prevalent than they were when they were struggling. He got into MMA before it went mainstream, and then that tanked pretty quickly. And then he got into NFTs, and also that tanked, thank God. Now, as far as I can tell, he's just running back to the convention business with his totally chill, way nice guy brother. Various puff pieces online praise Gareb Shamus as a nerdy extraordinaire who's brought people together thanks to Wizard and his various conventions. And while some good has come from some of his projects, the

25:30 answer to what Gareb Shamus is is painfully boring. He's a capitalist doing what he needs to squeeze, just, you know, another dollar out of an industry that already has far too few of those to go around. And that concludes another story in the rousing case files of the Mystery Treehouse. If you liked how we handled this story, please consider liking the channel, subscribing [music] maybe checking out our Patreon. >> [music] [music]