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The Real Reasons for Marvel Comics’ Woes
- pmoriarty 9y ago"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 9y ago> 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/challenge-of-the-demographics-men-and-women/87487/ https://comicvine.gamespot.com/profile/foxxfireart/blog/chal...) 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.