Print Magazines as Physical Media
Den of Geek does something amazing, and more people should try it.
I started my journalism career at age 19, when I cashed my first check for paid writing work. The assignment was an interview with superstar comic book artist Rob Liefeld, published in Wizard magazine, where I had been doing my internship for a couple of months by that point. Several members of my family subscribed to Wizard while I was there, and unless I’m mistaken, I don’t know that any of those people have ever read the 20 years of internet-based writing that followed.
In the years since, I’ve had to explain Wizard to younger folks, or to those who were never big into comics. My shorthand is that it was “Rolling Stone for comics,” which is mostly right, and gets the message across. Of course, in the time since Wizard, the number of geek-focused print magazines is way down. Not only is Wizard gone, but so are most comics magazines, and even seriously mainstream publications like Electronic Gaming Monthly. Entertainment Weekly has gone all-digital, except for some special editions (we’ll circle back to them in a bit), and things seems a little hopeless in the print journalism space generally, and in the entertainment subspace in particular.
Except, of course, for Den of Geek. The website, which (as the name suggests) covers the same “geek” space as sites like Comic Book Resources and ComicBook, actually has a physical media component that helps set it apart from its competitors.
Den of Geek, the magazine, is now available in just over 100 comic book shops around the country. You used to be able to subscribe to it online, although I no longer see that option. For the first year or so, the magazine was free, I think, to online subscribers — so I have a few issues kicking around. Sadly, I don’t shop at any of the 130 stores where it can currently be picked up, so I haven’t read it in a while.
Before the Den of Geek magazine was even a thing, I remember talking about the idea and others like it with Mike, a friend of mine who used to be the editor-in-chief at Den of Geek. Whenever I do a big, long-form story, I tend to think of how much easier it is to read that kind of thing in print, and that’s a conversation I had with Mike while we were having a few drinks at dinner in Belfast back in 2017.
(This video is actually of the folks playing music during that same dinner.)
We were in town to visit the set of Krypton (which I just talked about yesterday), and Mike and I were talking about some long-form text and video projects that our respective employers weren’t interested in. We talked about the importance of physical media in the nerd market, filled as it is with collectors, and unless I’m misremembering, Mike told me that his employers were entertaining the idea of doing a paper magazine at some point.
(Obviously if that’s true, the magazine wouldn’t launch for quite a while, so I might be putting words in his mouth.)
In any case, it’s something that he and I shared a passion for. We both realized that while everything was moving online, the particular audience that sites like ComicBook and Den of Geek were cultivating would be very open to some kind of collectible version of the biggest news in any given window of time.
I actually tried to pitch ComicBook on these once or twice, to no avail. I looked at things like Entertainment Weekly’s guides to Wonder Woman, Batman, and the Arrowverse, and thought “Why not us?” Basically, those guides are mostly just archival material, presented in an appealing way, with a handful of new bits thrown in for connective tissue.
I had pitched some — I can’t remember which, except for a Clerks 30th-anniversary book that Kevin Smith was open to doing — but they never got past the stage of “somebody has to pay to print it.” That’s fair enough. I wasn’t going to do it out of pocket (except the Clerks one, but that would have happened the company’s sale, when we weren’t really doing anything risky).
Comparing the EW one-shots to other physical media likely reveals the appeal: as the DVD market has shrunk, more and more of the Blu-ray and 4K UHD releases coming to the home video market have become feature-rich steelbooks, giving fans the “best yet version” of their favorite movies. In any given week, you’re as likely to get a new version of Star Wars or Jaws on 4K as the latest release. Yes, that means it’s becoming a niche market — but that niche is enthusiastic, and willing to spend money on the things they love.
Looking again to EW’s guide to the Arrowverse, that was a great product because there was, relatively speaking, very little for Arrowverse fans to buy. It was a passionate fan base that stayed active for a decade, but for much of that time, you couldn’t get a t-shirt or poster without buying one bootleg from eBay.
That has been the philosophy that guided my first few books at ECV Analog: it isn’t just what I’m interested in, but it’s the things I’m interested in…and where the fandom is underserved. Nobody else was going to write a book about Josie and the Pussycats or DC’s Legends of Tomorrow or The VelociPastor. You can’t even buy (non-bootleg) t-shirts for two of the three! But that doesn’t mean there isn’t a passionate audience who would love to have something to put on their shelves.
Den of Geek exists in that space, and the management there clearly understands fan culture in a way few people do. It’s no coincidence that everything from The West Wing and Cheers to the Arrowverse and The Boys have been the subject of those EW books; they’re a good product, and they fill a niche that has been largely ignored as more and more news is only available to many fans for the three hours before it moves down the front page of a website.
If you’re a fan of physical media, and you live where you can do so, I strongly encourage you supporting Den of Geek’s physical magazine. I think it’s not jut good for their own brand, but good for the geek space at large for it to exist.
It's actually funny that you say this because I have been thinking about doing a video about how I recently subscribed to a couple of magazines. Basically, I like having little treats that regularly come in the mail that make going to the mailbox a little less shitty. But I don't want to always have to buy something to have that experience and having a couple magazine subscriptions is a nice change of pace from all the bills that come.