by Logan Scisco This week we leave the confines of Titan Towers and head over to Bill Apter’s side of the wrestling magazine universe.  Launched in 1999, WOW Magazine was an alternative to other wrestling magazines, which largely kept kayfabe alive.  WOW catered to smart fans, using the terminology of “face” and “heel,” and even tried to smarten up younger fans by providing a vocabulary list of “smart wrestling terms.”  WOW also featured more color photographs, had more pages, and was larger than traditional wrestling magazines.  Unfortunately, the magazine did not produce enough sales to remain profitable and it folded in the summer of 2001.

This new column to the blog will provide a review of a different sort of wrestling:  that found on the pages of various wrestling magazines in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Between 1995 and 2002 I was a subscriber to WWF Magazine and supplemented that subscription by purchasing a few Apter magazines when I had some extra cash.  After heading off to college, I tossed these magazines into a box and have not opened it in nearly a decade.  I thought it might be interesting to randomly draw out a magazine a week and critique it for the Blog of Doom.  The visuals, stories, advertisements, and general ridiculousness of wrestling magazines during this period will hopefully provide the Blog with a series of fun discussions in the weeks and months ahead. This column will normally appear on the weekends, but since I will be away this weekend and could not upload it, I figured that I would just post it today.