Wizard co-founder and former editor in chief Pat McCallum has died. The news broke on June 6, 2022.

DC group editor Chris Conroy confirmed the news on Twitter, writing, “Okay, well, the news is out. The loss of Pat McCallum has crushed me today. I worked alongside him for years at DC, and he was one of the most deeply kind and gentle people I have ever met…”

McCallum worked in a comic shop early in his career and wrote a newsletter for the store’s customers, which became Wizard. The magazine began in 1991, providing news and interviews on the comic industry and similar topics. McCallum served as editor in chief until 2006, then the magazine stopped publication in 2011.

Also in 2011, McCallum started working at DC as an editor, and five years later he was a principal editor during DC’s Rebirth initiative in 2016. A year later he moved up to executive editor for a two-year period from 2017 to 2019.

After his passing, several comics industry professionals expressed their sentiments on social media. “Pat McCallum has passed. A big, kind, nerdy, cool dude who edited and wrote Wizard Magazine and was an editor at DC. He did a lot for comics for a lot of years, including making the call to let Joelle [Jones] and only Joelle design the [Catwoman] wedding dress. He was always on our side. RIP,” writer Tom King wrote on Twitter.

“I got to work with Pat McCallum on Metal and Death Metal, and he was a kind, thoughtful and deeply funny person who often served as a port in the storm that could be DC then. He also really, really loved comics and comics is a little less without him,” writer Scott Snyder wrote on Twitter.

“Stunned and saddened that we’ve lost Pat McCallum. If you ever liked anything about Wizard magazine or laughed at its pages, you had Pat to thank. When they fired him, he took everyone out to the bar, told us we were going to be okay & told me the funniest stories I’d ever heard,” writer Kiel Phegley wrote on Twitter.