InQuest Gamer magazine, published by Wizard Entertainment, will cease publication next month. The magazine was aimed at collectible card gamers, including a price guide for such cards. The publication website (no longer available) has a short notice that states After many years of producing InQuest Gamer magazine, we have decided to discontinue its publication effective September 2007. We will continue to support gaming in our industry leading magazines, online, and at our conventions. We thank our dedicated staff for all […]

Congratulations to Tim Leong (Editor-in-Chief) and Laura Hudson (Senior Writer) — after several struggles, their new magazine Comic Foundry arrives in comic shops this Wednesday. It looks terrific, with a very modern, professional design (although I do find myself agreeing with Diamond that it would be much better in color). It definitely fulfills Leong’s goal to do something unique, unlike any other comic periodical out there. The snarky sense of humor is evident from the cover, where near the top, […]

It’s a dream of many bloggers and comic journalists: to break into print, to create a new comic magazine. Many of them even have the same tag line in mind, something about filling the gap between Wizard (populist, tawdry, aimed at teenage boys) and The Comics Journal (high-minded, pretentious, aimed at academic art-comic readers). It’s an easy market to reach, since there’s only one major distributor, Diamond, and entry costs are low in comics (perhaps the lowest of any mass […]

Recently, a bunch of online commentators have been discussing how Wizard‘s how-to guide objectifies women. At first, all this hoo-hah sounded to me rather like Claude Rains’ character in Casablanca: “I am shocked, SHOCKED to find that gambling is going on in here!” Who doesn’t know that Wizard is targeted at adolescent (in mind if not still in body) males? Of course their view of women is of unknown creatures only to be stared at, because that’s how teenage boys […]

99 Ways to Tell a Story has been billed as a how-to book, but it’s more accurate to talk about it in reference to its subtitle. Matt Madden has been conducting “Exercises in Style”, telling the same short comic story 99 different ways (inspired by the work of Raymond Queneau). Madden is known as a proponent of formalism, the idea that creativity isn’t necessarily constrained by boundaries. Instead, artificial restraints (like restricting the number of pages or requiring that a […]