magazines.

magazines. they're like periodical publications of written and visual content about specific areas of interest.

i like magazines. they're typically inexpensive, and they [ideally] contain lots of fun stuff to intermittently quench my voracious thirst for knowledge and art. i rarely get the opportunity to receive something exciting in my mailbox, so when a magazine comes for me, that's about as good as it gets.

and you can read a magazine anywhere. in your bed. at a restaurant. on the bus. in a bathtub. at the dmv. take it anywhere you have to go. if you have some down time, you get to read your magazine.

magazines are also great treats when you need to buy something to make yourself feel good. like, you feel an emptiness inside that only retail therapy can [temporarily] subside-- just get yourself a nice magazine. in strange places like airports or hotels, you can usually find a good magazine. or when you go to a bookstore and you just want to buy yourself a present without breaking the bank. magazines are there, in great supply.

the proliferation of the internet has endangered magazines. people get all their fun junk from computers, so a lot of written publications lose customers and have to go away. but the internet will never do for me the things a magazine could do. i cannot enjoy the internet whenever i want. i have an iphone 3gs with a modest data plan that i am forced to ration like a hobbit with a tiny sack of magic elf bread.

and the internet is a surging river of data that never stops or even slows down. there's a lot of gold to be found, but also a lot of crap. is this website any good? does this person know what they're talking about? oh, here's a hundred links to other sites. this link no longer works. this page just got edited. oh, i just got sidetracked and spent ten hours reading something stupid. with a magazine, you have a first page, you have a last page, and you have the other pages inbetween. it's an issue. a tangible, unchanging, singular work that you can revisit forever. and maybe sometimes it comes with perfume samples or trading cards or something.

i've read a lot of magazines in my life. here are the ones i read with some regularity:

highlights - a children's magazine that's been around since 1946. i guess it had a lot of activities and stuff designed to help kids develop their minds in simple ways. this magazine had a great many regular installments, but my favorite by far was goofus & gallant. this was an illustrated thing that showed two boys reacting to similar situations differently. goofus would act like a total fuckup and gallant would always do the decent thing. like, goofus shoves a girl in the mud, and gallant helps a girl walk around the mud. or, goofus drops a bunch of shit on the floor and just leaves the room, and gallant cleans a spill with a paper towel. what's interesting about this strip is that it never condemns goofus or praises gallant. it presents two moral paths and leaves the young reader to follow the one that makes sense to him, whether he's a good egg or a sociopath.

zillions - there's this magazine called consumer reports that has been around since 1936. they test various products and services and write comparative reviews of them so people can be responsible with their money. zillions was the children's version of this magazine. i recall many articles testing out different toys and things marketed to kids, teaching kids to be savvy consumers. they also mocked popular commercials aimed at children, teaching them to see through the bullshit.

this was so great for a kid to read, because we always instinctively knew there was something bogus about every commercial. something sinister about the kids in the commercials playing with action figures on elaborate sets filled with breakaway blocks that just didn't exist. that's not what playtime was like. but to read an article where kids bitched about the flaws in all your dream toys-- now there was a vicarious thrill. and at a time in your life when it was impossible to know what to believe in, if someone could tell you that the edible creepy crawlers set would give you guaranteed diarrhea, or that the pog maker was a cheap piece of shit, you could really trust them when they said the latest mighty max playset was worth saving your allowance for the next hundred years.

but that's just a for example. i kinda liked the pog maker.

gamepro - there were a lot of gaming magazines in the 90's. it was the only way you could know which video games were worth playing, and once you played them, what the cheat codes were so you could beat them. nintendo power was pretty big then. i think gamepro was a little more fringe. like, if you wanted something edgier, you went for gamepro. my brother was into videogames (the magazine) and egm. i asked him if he liked gamepro too and he said no because he didn't care for their game coverage.

i didn't really read gamepro either. my fascination with it stemmed from their annual april fools' day issue that contained fake stuff in it. i guess i just wanted to see something that would fuck with my reality. the magazine itself could have been about anything.

teenage mutant ninja turtles magazine - this was a pretty short-lived magazine from 1990 that provided a lot of diverse enrichment, all through the context of the teenage mutant ninja turtles. like, you might find articles about karate, or skateboarding or something. and then it also had stuff that was just straight up about the ninja turtles. i think this was an interesting lens through which to view pop culture, and i wish more kids got to benefit from it before its demise.

my life has never been more intensely about one thing as it was about the ninja turtles in the early 90's (garfield the cat notwithstanding). when i was in 1st grade, i changed my name to donatello and started signing my name as such on my classwork papers. i was genuinely shocked when my teacher dismissed this idea, as if my own identity was better than that of a ninja turtle. she clearly hadn't thought this through.

disney adventures - this was a digest-sized thing for kids that also premiered in 1990. it was your basic youth rag. letters from kids, articles, entertainment news, interviews. there was a section featuring all the latest slang of the time. i wonder how many kids ever tried to incorporate it into their vocabulary, and were subsequently rewarded with class popularity, or possibly shunned for being lame. i think it took more than a few buzzwords to secure peer acceptance in elementary school.

disney adventures also had plenty of comics. this was my least favorite part. you don't want too many comics in a magazine. because if you want comics, you can just buy comics. i suppose a small amount of comics is okay in a disney magazine. when the lion king came out, they put a preview comic in there showing the story through mufasa's death. that was pretty fucking thoughtless.

simpsons illustrated - this 1991-to-1993 gem had some nice articles about the making of the show, as well as the burgeoning simpsons mania that swept the nation for a few pretty hardcore years. the best thing about simpsons illustrated was their tendency toward in-universe inserts and gags. like, an issue might include a full copy of the springfield shopper, so instead of just reading about the simpsons, now you were reading their newspaper. or there might be an article or diagram written from the perspective of a character, like bart's private notes on how to fuck around at school, or lisa's dream house or something. for about a half decade, the simpsons produced some of the most creative and impressive expanded universe literature of any televisual or theatrical property. garfield was also pretty innovative, but not to the same degree.

superman & batman magazine - i never visited a real comic book store until i was in college. the only comics i read as a kid were whatever they carried on that stupid rack at eckerd. so when this magazine premiered in july of 1992, i jumped at the chance to gain even a secondhand entrance to the world of superman and batman.

this magazine was a strange thing. it wasn't about any specific incarnation of either character. it was just a loosely-defined catch-all about everything and anything to do with them. the art was mainly in the aesthetic of bruce timm's batman: the animated series, and a lot of the batman content was about this show as well. but i also saw content about the knightfall story arc that was happening in dc comics, where bane had broken batman's back and a new batman had taken over and made a new armored suit (i remember piecing a lot of this together from a haunting advertisement for a book novelization of the story).

they also drew superman in the bruce timm style, even though he didn't have a bruce timm cartoon at the time. his hair was portrayed as long, to stay consistent with the comics, where he had just returned after the death of superman and reign of the supermen arcs. i caught peripheral glimpses of the four supermen who'd tried to take his place. the early 90's sure had a lot of stories about people filling in for slain superheroes.

anyway, this magazine only ran for like eight issues. i would've liked to see them mine for content a little longer than that.

nickelodeon magazine - this one started in the summer of 1993, and it was one of the most fulfilling publications i read as a kid. the irreverent humor injected into the elaborate art and weird articles brought a welcome taste of anarchy into my typical button-down elementary school life. these guys encouraged mischief and celebrated the strange and aberrant. a publication true to its namesake. i remember many inserts of prank graphics that readers were meant to pull out and use on their loved ones. tutorials showing how to draw ren & stimpy. an ongoing comic strip about sentient pieces of fried chicken called "southern fried fugitives." i also remember an issue where the cover was a picture of bill clinton as a boy, and inside was a bunch of articles about the future as envisioned from the 1950's. nothing against national geographic, but THAT was educational.

tv guide - this digest-sized weekly listing of tv shows started in 1953. it was useful for finding things you wanted to watch, but i primarily enjoyed the articles in the beginning of each issue. it was like a mini entertainment weekly, written by what seemed like a society of obsessive tv-watching trolls.

in 2005, tv guide ditched the digest format and became the size of every other magazine. it also expanded its front section of tv entertainment-related articles, because the tv listings themselves became useless to people who had (1) cable boxes with easily-navigable guides, or (2) an internet connection. and that's just about everybody, except maybe some old woman in maryland.

maxim - i started reading this in 2001 after receiving a subscription as a gift. it's a men's magazine with lots of articles about hot chicks, cars, fashion, alcohol, sex, and violence. its core audience is douchebags, assholes, and dickheads. perfect for any boy still braving the voyage into manhood.

my favorite thing about maxim was how it objectified women. they would print interviews with female celebrities that were like three questions long, staggered over a bunch of full-page spreads of them in sexually enticing photography. there was never any nudity in maxim, but the message was clear-- women are things, to be used for sex. it's nice for guys to be able to think like this, because then women suddenly don't seem so scary. the articles often provided handy guides explaining how to talk women into threesomes and stuff. this didn't teach me too much about women, but i think i learned a lot about men.

every year, maxim printed an insert ranking the 100 hottest women of the year. i enjoyed cross-referencing their list with that of fhm and stuff, which were two other men's magazines of the day. i would read those titles too, depending on who was on the cover. the june 2002 issue of fhm had a cover i will never forget. it was a medium shot of jennifer love hewitt. her arms were raised above her head, and her otherworldly breasts were just hanging there in the lower half of the picture. she had this look on her face like she'd just been tranquilized. it's one of the most erotic and unsettling things i've ever seen.

entertainment weekly - this magazine has been around since 1990. i imagine it was way more interesting for those first five or six years before everyone had internet. it's supposed to be pop culture coverage, but it seems more preoccupied with letting you know what an authority it is on everything. "here's who SHOULD win the oscar, and here's who WILL win the oscar!" i actually don't need a magazine to tell me either of those things.

every issue is like 60% arbitrary judgment or praise, 15% lists and stats without any insightful purpose, and the rest is just pictures and other filler. but the amount of filler increases whenever they have special issues, like "the photo issue" or "the summer preview issue." this is the only magazine i currently have a subscription to. mainly because i enjoy the mild thrill of getting something stupid in the mail every once in a while. i read it with the same morbid curiosity i would devote to a bathroom graffito or back of a children's cereal box.

what i do like about entertainment weekly is that every issue is a snapshot of that moment in pop culture history. sometimes, i'll buy a random back issue off ebay and explore it like a time capsule. that is actually pretty fun.

various writing magazines - in the early aughts, i was very excited to learn more about the craft of screenwriting and explore what was happening in that world. i read magazines like creative screenwriting, scr(i)pt, and writer's digest. i stopped reading them for three reasons. one, they were too expensive. two, the articles in the screenwriter magazines were usually about movies i hadn't seen yet. and three, every issue of these magazines is basically the same thing. i get the feeling most of their readers are short term. but i think this is probably the case with most magazines that are about a specific activity.

wizard - so when i finally started reading comic books for real in college, this magazine was really cool. i learned a lot from it about all the characters, writers, and artists i would come to love or not love in the following years.

in recent years, i came to dislike aspects of the magazine. like, they messed around with the format and it became aesthetically unrewarding to my eye. i also didn't like it when they devoted space to things that were part of "nerd culture," but only tenuously related to comic books. just because i read real comic books with superheroes in them doesn't mean i'm also going to like the tv show "heroes." in fact, it probably means i'm not gonna like it.

wizard ceased publication in 2011. as far as i know, there are no other magazines about comic books. there are websites, but it's not the same. there was a real artistry to wizard, once. in the way certain comic book stores can inspire a tangible (sometimes disturbing) sense of community, reading wizard was like carrying around a comic book store with you wherever you went. now, if you want to get that feeling, you have to go to an actual store. while they still exist.

psychology today - this is the only magazine i read today with any genuine interest. a few years ago, i watched a conan interview with christina ricci where she said her favorite magazine was psychology today. that made me pick up an issue and i loved it. this magazine addresses all the weird things about humanity and then explains why they are. its goal seems to be to help people improve their lives through a better understanding of our minds and bodies. i get a lot out of it. almost as much as i got out of the teenage mutant ninja turtles magazine.