Gareb Shamus: The Mystery Hidden in Plain Sight
By 1992, Gareb Shamus was one of the most well known forces in comic books, and folks like Todd McFarlane and Rob Liefeld were repeatedly flying the guy out to to visit them, while Valiant's offices opened their doors for him on a regular basis. Everyone knew the guy. Nearly synonymous with his publication, he had maximum visibility and brand name recognition among both creators and fans when comics were at their all time height in sales and popularity.
For someone once that high profile, Shamus is a pretty accessible guy today. Virtually all of his
facebook posts are set to public, with images of his house and children readily present. You don't need to friend Gareb to know what he had for dinner last night. And he walks around on his own at conventions, completely accessible, sans entourage (as
White Lando once proved). He's right out there, in plain sight.
And yet no one knows his story.
Take your time. Scour the web. There is absolutely no information available on how a recent college graduate started Wizard and so quickly rose to the level of prominence in the industry that he did.
So here's my paltry efforts to assemble the little we do know into some kind of a working theory.
What we know:We know that Shamus had the early support of a variety of mid to large size comic book dealers in the New York/New Jersey area. This much is evident by the fact that these dealers continued to get premium interior ad space in the book once Wizard was selling full page ads to the likes of Valiant, Image, and Marvel. It's further supported by the fact that, after Wizard cut back on these ads in issue #11 (the point at which they really started to get big and were suddenly garnering more attention from both Marvel and DC), they took an about face and made up for it so much in issue #12 as to return all the old ad space to those dealers AND make a separate ad listing each as part of the new official Wizard Cool Corps, promising exclusives and incentives to those who shopped from those businesses.
What we think we know:mrp provided us with second or third hand rumors that Shamus' family were themselves mid to large size dealers. This would certainly explain how Shamus gained these investor connections.
But that isn't enough by itself. Sure, those dealers could have given Shamus the start up capital to run a small time monthly magazine that effectively set the prices they wanted for the business, and maybe that would have provided enough revenue to get a fancy glossy cover and enough initial copies to get on Diamond and Capital City's lists, and
maybe some of those dealers were powerful enough to persuade the CEOs of both distribution companies to actually write articles for the first issue, but it still doesn't explain how the heck Shamus got the hottest artist in the business at the time to draw the cover AND provide the feature interview for the premiere issue. It just doesn't add up.
And this brings us to the last piece of information we think we know. According to
Buddy Scalera, a person who claims to have worked for Wizard on a freelance basis, there were investors behind Shamus who actually ran the whole affair and chose to stay out of the spotlight. Even Scalera refrains from naming them, but he invites others to explore the issue more deeply.
It makes sense, really. Even if high profile comic book dealers were looking for a way to fix prices on comics, and even if they had allegiance of some kind to Shamus' family, how in the world would they have access to Todd McFarlane and, more importantly, why would they put their faith in a recent college graduate with absolutely nothing on his resume, let alone a similarly untried staff of kids including Shamus' brother who (I believe) was still in high school?
This leads me to
What we can conjecture:I've talked repeatedly about Shamus himself being a brand. He was purposefully kept high profile -- the first article you'd read in the book, always led by a picture of him in some ridiculous shirt, with a nerdy smile, and some celebrity standing with him who was so thoroughly unimpressed by Shamus as to appear to be posing. That Shamus mocked himself in these photos indicates he was no clueness nerd; he knew what he was doing. Plus, images from before Wizard got big AND after its initial era of success show a far less (though admittedly somewhat) geeky Shamus.
A more recent picture of Shamus
it was an act; a means of better appealing to the target demographic of nerdy white kids reading comic books.
And I think this explains how Shamus and his staff got their secret investors to back them. They were the kids next door. They looked, wrote like, joked like, and thought like the target demographic. That's why someone put some heavy funding behind Wizard and made it their investment of choice.
Someone with significant access to Marvel and to Todd McFarlane.
One possibility is that it was Marvel itself. They took out the back cover (the most critical ad space in the publication) for the first three issues, and it helps to explain why all Wizard talked about in those first six issues was Marvel. In fact, even as of issue #12, they've given exactly one interview with a DC employee (Denny O'Neil), even republished an interview from another magazine instead of interviewing Simon Bisely about Lobo himself, and only gave that interview with Denny O'Neil and provided their only DC cover of the first 20 issues, as well as their only featured articles on a DC character in at least the first 12 issues, in order to address the hype being generated by the upcoming Batman Returns film. There was very clearly an anti-DC bias at Wizard, as well as a pro-Marvel one.
But I don't purport to know for sure. These are only theories.
It just seems so strange to me that, even two decades later and in the age of the internet, no one knows ANYTHING about Gareb Shamus nor the origin of Wizard Magazine, and I think having that story would help to explain a lot of Wizard's agenda and biases as we continue exploring the history of this publication.
