Over at Robot 6 @ CBR there is a look at Wizard World Digital:
When Wizard World CEO Gareb Shamus decided to cancel his long-running magazines Wizard and ToyFare, and relaunch them in an amalgamated electronic form as a digital magazine called Wizard World, he did not do so quietly. Well, alright, the initial press release didn’t so much as mention the cancellations themselves, or the employees laid off in the process. But Shamus has been quite vocal about his new project’s prospects for success, as well as what he perceives to be the dire state of the industries surrounding it. In an interview with iFanboy’s Ron Richards, Shamus spoke of the new digital magazine sharing the things its staff likes with “the millions of people that we reach all the time,†in contrast with more traditional digital-news outlets like websites, which he said “are pretty worthless in their ability to have an impact on an audience.†And in the editor’s letter (see above) for Wizard World‘s third issue, “Version 1.3,†by way of explaining why he made the leap to digital publishing, he writes:
The creativity in the comic book industry is at an all-time high, yet it saddens me to see that publishers can’t get new people excited, and are losing existing fans at an alarming rate. The publishers keep doing what they’ve done in the past, but keep expecting better results. Not gonna happen!
Perhaps Shamus’s apparent disdain for comics publishers he deems stuck in the past explains why Wizard World‘s first three issues contain exactly zero articles on currently ongoing Marvel or DC titles. (Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips’ Marvel/ICON book Incognito gets a graf in a piece on comics that should be made into video games, and toys for the upcoming Thor and Green Lantern movies get prominent play, though.)
check the whole thing out here