Posted in: Comics, Cosplay, Current News, Pop Culture | Tagged: gareb shamus, wizard

Gareb Shamus Of Wizard Magazine Claims They Invented Cosplay

Gareb Shamus of Wizard Magazine claims that they invented cosplay, but only did so by mistake. What do you think of that claim?

@alericheck How Comic Con's Founder Created Cosplay by Mistake Ever wonder how cosplay at comic conventions actually started? On the Marketing Minds podcast, I had Gareb Shamus, founder of Comic Con and Wizard Magazine, reveal this surprising origin story that most fans don't know. Back in the mid-90s before the internet existed, Gareb had a simple marketing problem with his Halloween issue. The solution he came up with accidentally launched a global phenomenon that completely transformed fan culture forever. What began as a small request to his readers created something that spread worldwide and is now an essential part of convention culture. Check out this short to hear Gareb tell the untold story of how cosplay as we know it today was born. #ComicCon #Cosplay #WizardMagazine #PopCulture #FanCulture #Conventions #CostumePlay #ComicBooks #NerdCulture #GeekHistory ♬ original sound – alericheck

Gareb Shamus, co-founder of Wizard Magazine: The Guide To Comics in the early nineties, and Wizard World conventions to follow, has been interviewed on TikTok, by Aleric Heck where he is credited as the Founder Of Comic Con. But that's not the only entertaining claim he is making. He states;

"So the way cosplay started was actually as a fluke because of the magazine. So I published Wizard magazine for many years. I started it back in the early 90s when there was. There wasn't even an internet. Our Halloween issue come out, and we wouldn't be able to show the costumes that people wore during Halloween until our December issue, because people would have to physically take pictures, print them out, send them to us, and then we publish it in the magazine. So when we did our first Comic Con in the mid-1990s, we went to our fans, and we said, look, we have our Halloween issue coming up. Can you do us a favor and dress up early for Halloween and come to the show dressed up in your costumes? And little did we know, when the show opened up, we had hundreds of people dressed up in costume. It was unbelievable. Everybody was wearing the coolest costumes of their favourite superheroes, whether it was Batman or Wolverine or Spider Man. It was really incredible how our audience turned out for us. And what happened was, all of a sudden, every other fan swarmed around them to take pictures with them and of them. And it was just one of these extraordinary experiences. So now we were able to take those pictures, put it in the magazine. So when the pictures of all these costumes came out in the magazine, everyone around the world saw it. It just set the world on fire. All of a sudden, everyone's like, holy crap, look what's going on here. And that kind of set off a chain reaction where every Comic Con and all the ones after us, everybody started dressing up at the Comic Cons."

It is certainly a bold claim, is it not? Well, I suppose that is what the internet is for. By the way, cosplay grew out of the practice of fan costuming at science fiction conventions, including the Vril-Ya Bazaar and Fete in 1891 at the Royal Albert Hall in London and Morojo's "futuristicostumes" for the 1st World Science Fiction Convention held in New York City in 1939. The Japanese word for "cosplay" was coined in 1984 by Nobuyuki Takahashi of Studio Hard after he attended the 1984 Worldcon in Los Angeles and saw costumed fans, which he later wrote about in an article for the Japanese magazine My Anime, rather than the existing word, "masquerade", which had aristocratic leanings. My first cosplay was in 1988, at the age of fifteen, at the London UKCAC event, for which there are thankfully no surviving photographs. don't go looking.

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