Our friends(?) at Wizard

The pigs must be flying; check out page 20 of the new issue of Wizard (#185). In the “Heat Index” column, they actually plug one of our publications, saying:

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COMIC BOOK NERD (TwoMorrows)
Creator Pete Von Sholly shoves this parody collection up every comic book-centric magazine’s butt (including Wizard) as he tears apart their concepts, designs and content with gut-busting precision satire.

I don’t mean to look a gift horse in the mouth, but other than our experimental PRIME8 comic of about ten years ago, this is the first time Wizard has ever given TwoMorrows any ink. Maybe all the jabs in CBN about how they only cover DC and Marvel did some good! I hope this is a sign they’re changing their editorial policy; the aforementioned George Khoury talked to a couple of the Wizard guys at a convention last year, and when he asked why they never cover our stuff, they said it was because we were their competition. (As flattering as that is, it’s laughable; our mags’ circulation is probably 1/10 of theirs at most, since ours are all geared toward more niche audiences.) In any case, it’ll be interesting to see if it results in any reorders of CBN.

(It’s funny; just yesterday, I took a call from a potential customer, who asked “Do you still have that book, The Urinal?” Anyone who’s read CBN knows he was talking about the Comics Journal spoof section, which was titled “The Comics Urinal”. When Pete pitched the CBN concept to me, that title really sold me on it; guess I was right that it’d stick in people’s minds.)

But while Wizard hasn’t covered our books in the past, they sure haven’t hesitated to excerpt our stuff in their mag without crediting it. A good example: in the same new issue, there’s a feature on Miracleman, using copious amounts of quotes and facts straight from interviews in our Kimota! The Miracleman Companion book. At least they mentioned the name of the Kimota! book this time within the article (but not TwoMorrows, or George Khoury, the author, and not as a major source of info for the piece). Oh well, one step at a time. Thanks for the coverage, Wizard; keep it up!