Comics! The Magazine

#1

Release:

Mar 11, 2026

Prana Publishers

Creators

Cover Artist

Nick Dragotta, Rico Renzi

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During a recent visit to the comic shop, I was provided with a freebie, provided in the spirit of “the first taste is free” in the hopes of getting me hooked.

Said freebie was, of course, the magazine shown above, a new entry into the old world of physical comics news media.

In the days before there was such a thing as the world wide web, before my hiatus from comic-buying, I was a regular reader of what could be described as the industry’s newspaper – especially given that it literally was a newspaper – the Comic Buyer’s Guide, or CBG.

I adored CBG, and it wasn’t unusual for it to be the best thing I picked up at the comic shop in a given week (it was the ’90s, after all).

I was also a semi-regular reader of Comics Scene magazine, and a less frequent reader of Wizard, though that magazine had its peak well after I’d stopped buying comics.

Comics! The Magazine has a segment devoted to the history of comic “fanzines” that shows a timeline of the mostly extinct magazines that have preceded its own debut, which I fear may serve as an example of the past being prologue.

Like the magazines of old, Comics! features interviews, profiles, previews, news, comic strips, a letter page – this one dominated entirely by letters from comicdom’s beloved scamp and Canadian National Treasure Chip Zdarsky, who published a comics-focused magazine himself – price guides, and classified ads.

It’s all put together nicely, though I will say that one of the selling points is also a bit of a drawback. The magazine itself has the same dimensions as a standard comic, which makes it easier for storing, but does tend to make the layout rather cramped. Text-heavy pages, such as the cover story interviews with the people behind Absolute Batman, incredibly dense and difficult for these old eyes to read. The font is a readable size, but there’s just so much text crammed onto the page.

I do miss the days of periodicals focused on comics, but I fear their time has long-since passed, and even the relative currency of the weekly CBG was not fast enough to keep up with the demand for news the way the web can, and while I hope for the best, I can’t help but think about the dozens and dozens of copies of this first issue that were still strewn about the shop during my last visit despite every regular customer getting a free copy the week before.

Ideally, they’ll have a better sense of demand with the next issue and can scale the supply appropriately, and I wish them the best of luck.

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