mindpollution.org

A few days ago, I posted a link to Laura Hudson’s analysis of a “statement” by Wizard Entertainment Chairman Gareb Shamus regarding his departure from the mixed martial arts league he co-founded and return to a more “active” role in his floundering publishing company.

Shamus subsequently mentions a closer consolidation of the magazine, website, and conventions, which is… kind of new, though given the recently personnel changes, it sounds less like an ingenious plan and more like a thinning staff being spread even wider.

WHICH IS TO SAY: Gareb Shamus is back from the IFL with fresh insights into Wizard. He thinks things could happen there, and that when they happen, those things will be new.

Hudson’s essay reminded me that I had yet to post some items of note I’ve received from current, former and in-flux (a.k.a., “freelance until I can get the hell away and never look back”) Wizard employees.

Ever since I went public with my Wizard Entertainment experiences, I’ve become a magnet of sorts for people who have had negative experiences with the company in one form or another. Among the 3-5 messages I receive each week regarding Wizard, one or two occasionally seem to merit passing along.

Here are some of the items I’ve been saving up in the ol’ inbox:

One former Wizard employee sent me a link to this recent column on Portfolio.com in which Franz Lidz examines the sudden rise and even-more-sudden fall of the IFL, noting:

The change in the U.F.C.’s fortunes did not go unnoticed by Gareb Shamus, founder of Wizard Entertainment Group in New York. The 39-year-old Shamus oversees comic-book conventions and a cluster of niche publications that includes Anime Insider, Special Ops Report, and his flagship title, Wizard, a pop-culture review aimed at nerds with Spider-Man and Angelina Jolie fetishes.

While I think the last line about Wizard being a “pop-culture review aimed at nerds with Spider-Man and Angelina Jolie fetishes” will probably earn most of the attention here, the article is worth reading with an eye toward comparing the decisions made throughout the IFL’s meteoric rise and subsequent crash, and what has become public knowledge with regard to the current decision-making process at Wizard Entertainment.

I also heard from a few more ex-Wizard employees who felt the urge to share their complaints about the company. Here’s an excerpt from one of the messages:

You hit the nail right on the head regarding the work experience there. When I first arrived, I was so shell shocked by the concept of working there that I would have done anything for the company, no questions asked. My boss [name deleted] called it the “Golly-Gosh-Wow Machine”, and I was sitting right in the center of it. I was so stunned by the fact that “My God, I’M WORKING FOR WIZARD”, that I threw all my loyalty into it.

Over time, the folks with the power, especialy editors like [name deleted] seemed to notice my devotion to the company, and started abusing it. Now, I realize that [dept name deleted] is the bottom of the barrel at the company, and we were often given all the crap jobs that no-one else would do. But, in my case, at least, the grunt work felt as if it doubled because it became clear to those in power that I never had the balls to say “no”.

While this pretty much falls in sync with the description of Wizard offered up by many former staffers and myself, it was another line from the same message that really caught my eye:

I spent several years afterwards bouncing back and forth between blaming myself for everything and blaming them for everything. In fact, I could not even read comic books for 2 years after I worked there.

That one hit home for me, as I remember not being able to relax and read a comic book for quite a while after my departure from Wizard due to the bad taste left in my mouth by the whole experience. Of course, this made it that much easier to sell off several boxes of comics I had collected over the previous years (in order to make up for the Wizard severance package I had declined) - but all that time, I really believed that the pit in my stomach that developed every time I considered reading a comic was a unique, personal reaction to the experience. Apparently, I wasn’t alone.

Finally, a current Wizard employee pointed me in the direction of the new weekly webcomic interview series at WizardUniverse.com that debuted this week. As some sites have already noted, anyone who’s been following my current work with ComicMix and the content that debuted on Wizard’s site during my tenure will probably feel a bit of deja vu here. Yes, this is basically an attempt to recreate the same series that Wizard’s former online staff writer and I began on their site two years ago (even to the point of interviewing the same people in essentially the same order we originally spoke to them).

It’s probably worth mentioning that I was only able to get the go-ahead for the original series on Wizard’s site after: A) explaining what “webcomics” were to the rest of the Wizard editorial staff; B) explaining that yes, people do indeed read these “comics on the web”; and C) showing them that the interviews I had already run on the site (before I bothered to broach the subject with the higher-ups) had actually received more traffic than the latest “Smallville’s Hottest Babe” feature.

I still remember portions of the conversation, including at least one Wizard higher-up (who has since been promoted) telling me, “Why would we want to cover any comics people just give away on the web? They’re not REAL comics.”

I was grudgingly given the approval to conduct more interviews with webcomic creators, with the caveat that we should also “figure out how to get them to advertise on the site.”

At one point, I was even told that I should encourage webcomic creators to engage in product-placement of Wizard Magazine in the background of their comics. As was the case with a lot of these types of suggestions during my time with Wizard, I responded with a nod, suppressed a shiver and then immediately put it out of my mind. In this case, I was told a short time later that I should “see if you can convince them they need to be recognized as REAL comics, and that we’re the ones to give them that recognition.”

Looking back on it now, that last bit still makes me twitch a little. I think that the only reason I’m able to remember so much of these conversations now is because of how uncomfortable they made me at the time. In the end, it was this lack of understanding about webcomics or any number of other aspects of the comics industry outside those that have turned a profit for them thus far that allowed me to be entirely unsurprised when Wizard nuked the entirety of those webcomic interviews during the last website redesign. That decision didn’t make sense to anyone who hadn’t worked at Wizard and was puzzled over in the public eye for quite a while, but the thought-process behind it was entirely too familiar to former employees.

Now that Wizard has begun conducting weekly webcomic interviews again, I can’t help but wonder if someone in the editorial office received the same instructions I did more than a year ago. Here’s hoping they have the good sense to ignore them, too.