Shamus started the magazine straight out of college 15 years ago. The impetus for turning a hobby into a living came from his father. "My dad was always involved in a number of businesses," says Shamus. "He would never come home and say, 'Oh, my boss, I can't stand him.' I never heard that stuff. It was, you come up with an idea and you build it. You go rent some space and hire some people and make it work. That taught me that you can make anything you enjoy into a career."
What Shamus and his three brothers enjoyed was collecting stuff, especially comic books. Even before Shamus left for college at the State University of New York in Albany, the siblings had amassed such a vast collection of comics, sports cards, action figures, and other memorabilia that their mother had opened a store to sell it all. On campus, Shamus saw that his peer group shared his interests, not just in comic books but in the people and industry behind them. He realized that though there were magazines devoted to behind-the-scenes looks at the film and music businesses, there was almost nothing like that for comics. He also learned from his mother's store that in the world of comics and other pop culture collectibles there was little reliable price guide information such as readily existed for stamps or coins or baseball cards. After graduating, he worked for six months out of a spare bedroom in his parents' house, testing the waters with a low-cost newsletter. Satisfied with the feedback from his mother's customers and other readers, he presented a business plan for the magazine to his father, who became his angel. In 1991 Shamus launched Wizard.
The timing was perfect. Until that point, the comic book industry had been dominated by two publishing giants, DC and Marvel Comics. But just eight months after Wizard debuted, a schism split the industry. Seven top young artists from Marvel left to start a new imprint, Image. "I was friends with all these guys, mostly my age, and they needed an outlet to tell the world what they were working on," says Shamus. "All of a sudden Wizard was the vehicle for these guys who sold millions of copies of their books to tell their story. We had all this information, what new titles and characters they were working on, and we had it first." Around the same time, another imprint, Valiant, also took off, fueling the fire.
Wizard found its audience with a multipronged approach, targeting fans, the industry, and collectors, and less than a year after it debuted, Shamus says, he knew it was a viable business. The rash of comic-based big-budget films pouring out of Hollywood the past few years, such as the Spider-Man, Batman, and X-Men franchises, have helped drive interest and readership. Today the magazine enjoys circulation of 185,000, a figure Shamus considers "fantastic" for a niche publication.
Early on, Wizard was sold by the nation's 5,000-odd comic specialty retailers, mostly mom-and-pop shops. Shamus watched them closely and developed a knack for spotting trends. For one thing, he noticed that they were diversifying their product lines and starting to sell action figures and toys, fantasy and role-playing games and accessories, and the newly popular Japanese animation products. Much of the gaming expansion was driven by the launch of a best-selling card game called Magic: The Gathering, essentially a faster and easier to play alternative to Dungeons & Dragons, the fantasy game that enjoyed its heyday in the 1970s. Shamus's response to Magic was to launch InQuest Gamer, a magazine covering the character gaming world with reports on strategies, products, and competitions. Like Wizard, it became the leader in its category.
Between 1991 and 1994, Shamus launched five magazines, three of which quickly became profitable. The other two foundered, however, and had to be shut down shortly after their debuts. In a way, the two losers--one a pure trade magazine about the comic book industry, the other a sports-card-collecting publication--were as important to Shamus's ultimate success as the winners. They prompted him to adopt two rules: one, he would not do anything that might jeopardize his cash cow, Wizard; and, two, he would assign performance metrics, time and revenue benchmarks, to all new projects and would reevaluate them if they did not perform as projected.
