I’ll admit that, being a wrestling fan since I was 5 years old, I was intrigued last year when I learned that WWE Magazine relaunched, promising a bigger and bolder look. I picked up a copy soon after to see if this magazine was any different from the publication I read endlessly when I was younger. When I opened it, I was surprised by what I saw: Lifestyle tips, stories about wrestlers’ lives outside of the ring, scantily clad female wrestlers on exotic beaches, and magazine editors having wrestling moves performed on them to see how much they actually hurt. What I was seeing looked more like what I would find in Maxim. It was sleeker, edgier, sarcastic, and funny, and I was actually paying attention to what was written in the features.
Given these improvements in quality, I was disappointed when I picked up WWE Magazine’s recent anniversary issue. That’s not to say that the magazine has already lost its edge since its relaunch. It’s still refreshingly snarky, and it’s not afraid to poke fun at itself and the WWE for blunders and bad judgment calls each has made over the years. But I was expecting more writing, especially since the writing quality had improved so much in recent years. I was actually excited to read what the editors had to say about the changes that both the magazine and pro-wrestling had gone through in the 25 years since WWE Magazine’s first publication. What I got instead was 102 pages overloaded with small pictures and snippets of (mainly) sarcastic commentary on almost everything that’s been covered by the magazine.
The pages themselves didn’t look bad. The art designers of the magazine certainly know how to make everything stand out on the page. Pictures that were big enough were bold, detailed and colorful. The sarcastic captions were funny, too, quick to poke fun at over the top wrestlers (The Goon, who wrestled in full-on hockey gear), bad feature decisions (a 17,000 word yawn inducing retrospective of The Undertaker’s career in WWE), and unintended sexually risqué statements made in cover lines.
But, I was still disappointed when the only real writing I saw was merely a bunch of clips from past articles that more or less featured long quotes from interviews with past and present wrestlers. To WWE Magazine’s credit, the clips were from more recent years, reflecting the growing trend for WWE publications to reveal what goes on outside of the ring, such as Stone Cold Steve Austin’s walk out of WWE in 2002 and a fight in England between drunken fans and WWE wrestlers and security that wreaked havoc on a hotel lobby and parking lot. But still, the lack of new, original writing was a disappointment.
Overall, the new look of WWE Magazine is a better reflection of its audience’s view of sports-entertainment. However, the recent anniversary issue read more like a scrapbook. While it was fun to take a look back through the magazine’s 25-year history, the editors still could have treated it as a regular issue and included some actual writing. It didn’t need to be profound; I just wanted something more than photos and captions. It’s a shame that the magazine couldn’t provide it.
-Trey M. Wydysh-
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