
The Real Reasons for Marvel Comics’ Woes - teh_klev
https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2017/05/the-real-reasons-for-marvel-comics-woes/527127/?single_page=true
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pmoriarty
_" What we heard was that people didn’t want any more diversity," David
Gabriel, the company’s senior vice president of sales and marketing, told an
interviewer at the summit. "They didn’t want female characters out there.
That’s what we heard, whether we believe that or not ... We saw the sales of
any character that was diverse, any character that was new, our female
characters, anything that was not a core Marvel character, people were turning
their nose up against."_

It's tempting to jump to the conclusion that Marvel's fans (or at least the
ones voicing such opinions) are mostly on the socially conservative or
reactionary part of the political spectrum. It would be interesting to hear
from the fans themselves about this, expanding on what it is about diverse
characters that they don't like.

~~~
belorn
> We saw the sales of any character that was diverse

That is not from voiced opinions, but sale statistics. You could jump to the
conclusion that the people buying marvel content is "mostly on the socially
conservative or reactionary part of the political spectrum", but going to
cause-and-effect is difficult when there is so many unknown variables. For
example, marketing effects sale statistics and sale statistics effects
marketing.

Then we have manga
([https://comicvine.gamespot.com/profile/foxxfireart/blog/chal...](https://comicvine.gamespot.com/profile/foxxfireart/blog/challenge-
of-the-demographics-men-and-women/87487/)) where the top two selling manga
series in Japan for 2012 had a majority female readership (with a small
margin). It would be interesting to see the sale numbers for the US but it
would not surprise me if it had similar that of japan.

