A few days ago a discussion and subsequent interview with David Gabriel, Marvel Comics’ Senior VP of Sales and Marketing, at their retailer summit began making the rounds, but not for the reasons the publisher was hoping. Marvel has every reason to be concerned, as their share of the market has shrunk dramatically in the last few months. Figuring out the cause of that decrease is vital for Marvel’s survival—yet the answer they’ve come to isn’t just inaccurate, it’s also offensive.
Later, Gabriel gave another interview that, in part, rehashed that hoary old proverb that diversity doesn’t sell: “What we heard was that people didn’t want any more diversity. They didn’t want female characters out there. That’s what we heard, whether we believe that or not. I don’t know that that’s really true, but that’s what we saw in sales. 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.” And with that, comics Twitter was all a-tizzy.
The stated goal of the summit was “to hear directly from [retailers] on what they are encountering within the industry and how Marvel can work with them to make sure they know that we hear them.” This summit was only open to cherry-picked retailers and Marvel offered no means of communication to those not attending, all of which puts the whole event—and the assumptions being made as a result—into question. Although the conclusions drawn by the summit can’t be totally dismissed, they also shouldn’t be used as the foundation of a whole new business model, either. Unfortunately, though, Marvel doesn’t seem to agree.
Disregarding the sugarcoated PR update Marvel made praising diverse fan favorites, Gabriel’s comments are so patently false that, without even thinking about it, I could name a dozen current titles across mediums that instantly disprove his reasoning. With its $150 million and counting in domestic earnings, Get Out is now the highest grossing original screenplay by a debut writer/director in history; meanwhile, The Great Wall, Ghost in the Shell, Gods of Egypt, and nearly every other recent whitewashed Hollywood blockbuster has tanked. Even sticking strictly to comics, Black Panther #1 was Marvel’s highest selling solo comic of 2016. Before Civil War II, Marvel held seven of the top ten bestselling titles, three of which (Gwenpool, Black Panther, and Poe Dameron) were “diverse.” Take that, diversity naysayers.
No, the crux of the problem with Marvel’s sales isn’t diversity; the problem is Marvel itself.
Old Guard versus the New Wave
Comic book fans generally come in two flavors: the old school and the new. The hardcore traditionalist dudes (and they’re almost always white cishet men) are whinging in comic shops saying things like, “I don’t want you guys doing that stuff…One of my customers even said…he wants to get stories and doesn’t mind a message, but he doesn’t want to be beaten over the head with these things.” Then there are the modern geeks, the ones happy to take the classics alongside the contemporary and ready to welcome newbies into the fold. I’ve walked out of at least a dozen shops run by guys like that gatekeeping retailer, and yet I regularly commute across two counties just to spend my money at a shop that treats me like a person instead of a unicorn or fake geek girl (Hera help me, I hate that term). I should also point out that these old school fans aren’t even all that old school: until about the 1960s, when comics moved into specialty shops, women read comics as voraciously as men. Tradition has a very short term memory, it seems.
This gets to the point made by a woman retailer at the summit: “I think the mega question is, what customer do you want. Because your customer may be very different from my customer, and that’s the biggest problem in the industry is getting the balance of keeping the people who’ve been there for 40 years, and then getting new people in who have completely different ideas.” I’d argue there’s a customer between those extremes, one who follows beloved writers and artists across series and publishers and who places as much worth on who is telling the story as who the story is about. This is where I live, and there are plenty of other people here with me.
Blaming readers for not buying diverse comics despite the clamor for more is a false narrative. Many of the fans attracted to “diverse” titles are newbies and engage in comics very differently from longtime fans. For a variety of reasons, they tend to wait for the trades or buy digital issues rather than print. The latter is especially true for young adults who generally share digital (and yes, often pirated) issues. Yet the comics industry derives all of its value from how many print issues Diamond Distributors shipped to stores, not from how many issues, trades, or digital copies were actually purchased by readers. Every comics publisher is struggling to walk that customer-centric tightrope, but only Marvel is dumb enough to shoot themselves in the foot, then blame the rope for their fall.
Stifling the Talent
As mentioned earlier, it’s not just the characters comics fans follow around, but writers and artists, as well. Marvel doesn’t seem to think readers care all that much about artists versus writers, but I’ve picked up a ton of titles based on artwork alone that I wouldn’t normally read. Likewise, I’ve dropped or rejected series based on whether or not I like an artist. Even with the lure of Saladin Ahmed as writer, my interest in Black Bolt was strictly trade. The main reason I switched to wanting print issues? Christian Ward. Veronica Fish single-handedly kept me on issues after Fiona Staples left Archie, and her leaving is the main reason why I dropped down to trades. I’ll follow Brittney L. Williams wherever she goes, regardless of series or publisher.
So why then does Marvel think that “it’s harder to pop artists these days”? A lot of it has to do with the dearth of decent advertising (especially outside comics shops) and a lack of institutional support for those artists. Also, scattering artists from book to book before they can establish a presence on a title, turning creative feats into flashbang one-offs with little continuity, is a grave Marvel has dug for itself.
But we also have to talk about how publishers don’t let their artists talk freely about their projects. Social media contracts often make it impossible for creators to address audience concerns, as Gail Simone points out, and change the way they interact with their fans. The more the Big Two seek to control expression and discussion, both on the page and online, the more they drive creators to small presses, indie publishers, and self/web publishing. A tangential arm of this conversation is how craptacular the pay is for freelance comics creators and how publishers should be utterly ashamed of themselves. But that’s a topic for another day.
Oversaturation
There’s soooo much stuff. If longtime fans are drowning in options, think how newbies must feel staring at shelf after shelf after shelf of titles. CBR crunched the numbers and found that in a 16-month window from late 2015 to early 2017, Marvel launched 104 new superhero series. A quarter didn’t make it out of their second arc. How can anyone, especially new and/or broke readers, be expected to keep up with that? Moreover, with that many options on the table, it’s no wonder Marvel can’t establish a tentpole. They’ve diluted their own market.
At first blush, giving everyone what they want sounds good, but in practice it simply overwhelms. Right now there are two separate Captain America titles, one where Steve Rogers is a Hydra Nazi and one where Sam Wilson is an anti-SJW jerkwad. There are also two Spider-Mans, two Thors, and two Wolverines, one each for longtime fans and one for newer/diverse/casual fans. And the list goes on.
Adding a steady stream of events and crossovers isn’t helping matters. Event fatigue is a genuine problem, yet Marvel has two of ‘em lined up for 2017. Given the sales for Civil War II, I acknowledge that I’m in the smaller camp here, but I stopped buying all but my hardcore faves during that crossover event and will do the same again through Secret Empire and Generations, assuming they don’t get cancelled and relaunched. I’m not going to follow characters across half a dozen titles I don’t want to read when all I want is a good, self-contained story told by talented creators. Events often end up relaunching already strong-selling titles, sometimes with the previous team but oftentimes not, which forces the reader to decide whether to drop or keep. Given Marvel’s numbers, looks like most fans are opting to drop, and I can’t blame them.
Diversity versus Reality
When you look at the sales figures, the only way to claim diversity doesn’t sell is to have a skewed interpretation of “diversity.” Out of Marvel’s current twenty female-led series, four series—America, Ms. Marvel, Silk, and Moon Girl—star women of color, and only America has an openly queer lead character. Only America, Gamora, Hawkeye, Hulk, Ms. Marvel, and Patsy Walker, A.K.A. Hellcat! (cancelled), are written by women. That’s not exactly a bountiful harvest of diversity. Plenty of comics starring or written by cishet white men get the axe over low sales, but when diversity titles are cancelled people come crawling out of the woodwork to blame diverse readers for not buying a million issues. First, we are buying titles, just usually not by the issue. Second, why should we bear the full responsibility for keeping diverse titles afloat? Non-diverse/old school fans could stand to look up from their longboxes of straight white male superheroes and subscribe to Moon Girl. Allyship is meaningless without action.
“Diversity” as a concept is a useful tool, but it can’t be the goal or the final product. It assumes whiteness (and/or maleness and/or heteronormitivity) as the default and everything else as a deviation from that. This is why diversity initiatives so often end up being quantitative—focused on the number of “diverse” individuals—rather than qualitative, committed to positive representation and active inclusion in all levels of creation and production. This kind of in-name-only diversity thinking is why Mayonnaise McWhitefeminism got cast as Major Motoko Kusanagi while actual Japanese person Rila Fukushima was used as nothing but a face mold for robot geishas.
Rather than getting hung up on diversity as a numbers game, we should be working toward inclusion and representation both on and off the page. True diversity is letting minority creators tell their own stories instead of having non-minorities creating a couple of minority characters to sprinkle in the background. It’s telling a story with characters that reflect the world. It’s accommodating for diverse backgrounds without reducing characters to stereotypes or tokens. It’s more than just acknowledging diversity in terms of race and gender/sexual identities but also disabilities, mental health, religion, and body shapes as well. It’s about building structures behind the scenes to make room for diverse creators. G. Willow Wilson said it best: “Diversity as a form of performative guilt doesn’t work. Let’s scrap the word diversity entirely and replace it with authenticity and realism. This is not a new world. This is *the world.*…It’s not “diversity” that draws those elusive untapped audiences, it’s *particularity.* This is a vital distinction nobody seems to make. This goes back to authenticity and realism.”
Alex Brown is a teen librarian, writer, geeknerdloserweirdo, and all-around pop culture obsessive who watches entirely too much TV. Keep up with her every move on Twitter and Instagram, or get lost in the rabbit warren of ships and fandoms on her Tumblr.
We must be diverse!
Start keeping score of the number of diverse characters in each category.
Sounds more like token representation to me. It looks like the only reason to have a PoC, female, gay Captain America is to check three boxes at once. Is there a real story in that comic? Who knows, the obvious pandering just on the cover is a turn off in itself
I represent someone who has dropped off the bandwagon in the last year, but it wasn’t diversity. I actually was reading several of the “diverse” books. It was Marvel’s addiction to really badly done “epic crossover events.” Secret Wars just slew me. It was farfetched, even by comic standards, impossible to follow without dedicating yourself to a dozen or more books, and I just plain stopped reading. I’ve poked my head in recently and it looks like they never even let the dust settle, they just plowed straight into the new Civil War. I’ll pass.
Not trying to nitpick here, but the 1960s was a pretty long time ago. Print comics have also changed a lot since then — the main lines from Marvel and DC are decidedly more violent or “gritty” than their 1960s equivalent (not to mention being somewhat more set in their ways).
And that kind of brings us back to the old school fans. We can’t tell someone what to buy — or at least we can’t do so and expect them to actually buy something different. The Big Two have spent a long time writing the same stories repeatedly, and catering to a particular audience that often prefers them over the more varied Indie and non-American comic scenes. That’s not to say that they should only focus on that, or that people who aren’t in that particular audience can’t enjoy their comics; rather, its that they’re used to a very focused marketshare, and they’re going to experience some growing pains expanding out to other markets.
And given how much competition they have from other aspects of that market, I’m not entirely certain they *can* keep their current sales rates, whether they reach out or not. How much have they lost to the manga scene? How much to webcomics?
Marvel’s ultimate problem with this past run wasn’t diversity, it was that they introduced new characters whole cloth, but kept the same marketing tactics (“events”, sudden character changes, switching writers and artists midstream) that have been considered acceptable to their core for a long time, but do not appeal to new readers.
Marvel hasn’t put any promotion or anything else for artist since ’92 (the Image Exodus).
I am a former comic book junkie. I used to buy new issues (mostly Marvel) every week. However, it’s been almost two decades since I bought a new issue. Nowadays, I mostly get my comics in TPB or through Hoopla (a library digital content service). The main reason I stopped buying was similar to Kathy @2 – there were too darned many crossovers. I think I sizzled out during the Phalanx Covenant. After a recent perusal of my collection, I discovered that most of them were published before I was born (and boy, the ads…).
However, I don’t think diversity is the reason why or why not these books are selling. I think it’s because the parents corps, Disney, for Marvel, and WB, for DC, are just giving us the same thing over and over again. They expect people to buy it because it features some underrepresented facet of our culture, but in the end, they’re just giving us the same thing with a different face.
The reason why a film like Get Out did so well versus a film like Ghost in the Shell has nothing to do with the skin color (well, Get Out does sort of depend on that to work), but rather the fact that one of these was a crafted film that said “screw it” to commercial appeal, and the other was a celluloid defecation of a corporation looking only to recycle old ideas for the deposit. People want new(ish) ideas, not the constant stream of reboots we always seem to get (how many times must we see poor Uncle Ben die!?).
If Marvel and DC and all the rest want to sell, they need to make the stories work letting the creators create without having to worry about checking boxes (of any sort) or have to answer to a board of people who have their pulse so far off the culture that they’re too afraid to take risks.
In the end diversity is pointless if the only purpose of including it is to be diverse (as anon said @1: tokenization). If Marvel and DC want to have a diverse hero rake in the big bucks, crafting a convincing character with real problems and a compelling story is sure to sell more than replacing a mainstay character with a less white/less male version.
I’d say the bigger issue with declining sales is the fact that Disney and WB are at the helm, and they are averse to trying anything new unless it’s guaranteed to “make it rain.”
(also, off topic: am I the only one having increasingly difficult times posting of late? The JavaScript on this site is misbehaving for me. I’m practically using Lynx to comment here.)
@1:
“It looks like the only reason to have a PoC, female, gay Captain America is to check off three boxes at once.”
Really, the only reason? Because, all gay PoC must be males? All female PoCs must be straight? Or is it only the American branding you object to?
The character isn’t Captain America, btw, her name is America Chavez, aka Miss America, and currently appearing in a title called America, and who has appeared in various other titles over the years, several before she was revealed as queer (I believe). I assume that was okay with you when she was just a female PoC in American Flag themed clothes, but adding one more box suddenly was obvious tokenism? In any event, I like to think a good enough reason to have a character who checks off three boxes at once is because it makes an interesting character.
The fact that she’s punching Hitler is called a throwback, and yes, it’s a thing that’s quite often done to pander to comic fans by casting newer characters in iconic images usually featuring other iconic characters, oddly, it seems to only get grief about that pandering when it’s also involving characters who aren’t traditional white males.
@2: Yeah, I dropped out from reading Marvel for Secret Wars too. It wasn’t just following the crossover, it was the sense that they tore apart characters and groups I loved and in fact the whole universe (yes, I understand it was eventually put back in mostly the same shape but with annoying cherry-picking of popular concepts from other universe like Old Man Logan and Miles Morales to weld them into the main universe, instead of letting them continue in stories that you don’t have a suddenly universe-bending crossover just to grasp their entire history). And I was really digging both Squirrel Girl and Miss Marvel before then, too, but I just didn’t have the energy to follow what happened next.
The problem is NOT diversity. The problem is taking the characters who have been part of people’s lives for 50 years or longer and changing their race, sex or sexual preference overnight. The people at Marvel and DC have decided that the boomer generation iconic figures are no longer allowed to be their iconic figures. They MUST BE CHANGED. Rewritten and recast, the characters resemble alternative universe characters who bare only a superficial resemblance to the original ones.
The comic book industry has decided that the original characters are too firmly entrenched in Americana and rather than actually develop new characters with new personalities, talents and feelings, they would rather obliterate the existing ones and hope that they are accepted and like TOR cry out the world is a bad place and hateful of everything new.
The reality is there is nothing new in these characters. Alternate universes have been a plot tool for a long time in the comic book world. Marvel and DC have just decided that our historical characters are the ones that are part of the alternate universe not the new ones. When Marvel, DC and yes, even the television studios admit that the answer is not to delete and replace the old characters, but to come up with innovative, new characters that continue to fight archetypal battles between good and bad, instead of faux struggle between “mainstream historical norms” and the belief that there are no norms and no set of circumstances that logically lead to another set of circumstances.
I agree with the first 4 paragraphs of Mark W’s Comment 7 but then it sort of veers in a unusual direction and gets close to edge of political parody. Pull back, pull back, you were doing so well…
One question that needs to be answered is compared the sales of individual issues versus trades. Personally I wouldn’t find it surprising if characters with more diverse backgrounds did better in collected editions. Partially because they appeal to newer, sometimes younger readers, who want a full story instead of a quarter or a sixth of one. That could also be part of why a number of retailers don’t see those characters moving. Buying a collected edition it is a better deal online. If most of a person’s fan activity is already online why not purchase there instead of making time to go to a store.
People who are still a fan of the character, still buying product, and invisible to most comic book retailers. Unfortunately since pre-orders of individual issues decide what books get kept and what gets cancelled waiting for trades translates to comic book companies as not supporting the character.
@9I think the distinction you are describing is Trade Paper Back vs Graphic Novel. Often the GN sobriquet is applied to a work published in it’s entirety all at once, rather than monthly in episodes. Usually.
@7Mark W., the problem is that the ‘Big 2’ keep rehashing the same cross-over events year after year.
Diversity isn’t the problem. The unwillingness of Marvel & DC to try new things, and be patient with them, is. There are lots of comic book authors & artists dying to get published. Is all of it good? Of course not. But there isn’t a willingness to try something new.
And, honestly, these publishers get crucified by readers such as yourself when they do try to promote new and innovative comics and characters.
So they ‘half-ass’ it by ‘retconning’ some characters, instead of promoting new ones. Same as they have done for years.
That said, a friend who is an avid cosplayer and comic nerd (yes, one of those ‘fake gamer girls’ I have been warned about) was thrilled when Jane Foster took over the mantle of Thor.
So representation matters, as the saying goes. Doesn’t matter if you voted for Barack Obama ’cause you were black, or JFK ’cause you were an Irish Catholic, or even if you were like me as a child & thrilled to see Jim Rice in an all-star game as he was my favorite Red Sox player & few Sox players were ever in the all-star game when I was growing up.
As to your political angle, I am sorry you believe that any news source that doesn’t agree with your world view is considered ‘fake.’ I am sorry you are afraid of some ‘ultra left liberal agenda’ ruining your comic books.
I don’t agree with your implied world view. As to the reasons for the results of the last election, neither you nor I are properly qualified to ascertain the ‘true’ reasons – nor is this article the place for it, honestly.
Kato
PS – As to the artists & writers talking on social media, I have seen both Gail Simone & Brian Michael Bendis state many times that the main reason for this is simple copyright infringement. They don’t want to be put into a position where someone online brings a suit against them for something that could be construed as having been taken by a comic creator from a fan’s comment.
Final paragraph of comment #7 removed for being off-topic and in violation of the guidelines clearly outlined in our Moderation Policy.
@9: I whole heartedly agree with your first bit about comparing sales. Problem is, that data isn’t available. Diamond (the main comics distributor to shops) only releases numbers for how many comics (read: issues) are shipped to stores, not how many the stores actually sell or how many are returned due to lack of sales in shops. And a large portion of trades aren’t sold in comics shops but in bookstores, online retailers, library suppliers, and school book fairs, most of whom don’t go through Diamond at all. MOON GIRL, for example, only ships about 8k issues per month through Diamond but does gangbusters at the Scholastic Book Fair as trades.
You’re right that if we had that data it would probably show that the more “diverse” titles sell better in trade (and digitally) than in print issue. I’d bet good money on that, in fact.
I will say this, from a bookseller perspective–
We don’t order at all from Diamond because they are a hot mess to deal with. A lot of readers (myself included) wait for trade. What is selling most in our bookstore?
Ms. Marvel, Lumberjanes, Black Panther, Bitch Planet, March, Saga, Moon Girl, Nimona, Tokyo Ghoul, Wayward, Walking Dead, etc.And that’s not even getting into middle grade comics.
This is true across all stores. We don’t sell singles, so our perspective on that is different. But from our stand point? Diversity sells like crazy, but then, our staff also supports it.
Marvel’s biggest problem for me was that Civil War II nonsense. They also seem to be unwilling to keep together a creative team, and I think that goes back to the Image exodus where they’re scared of losing their bargaining position, or of just losing good artists who want to start telling their own stories.
Their best books in the past couple of years have been the ones which don’t have to manage this “flagship” status. Hellcat, Squirrel Girl, Vote Loki, and Ms. Marvel were excellent at their start (and through their entire run in some cases). For some reason, they felt they needed to reboot Squirrel Girl and Ms. Marvel, and the CW:II event especially hurt Ms. Marvel’s story.
On the flip side, I liked Capt. Marvel, but the stories weren’t that interesting and seemed to get increasingly muddled once the crossover stuff really got going. The same goes for All New Wolverine and probably all of their “flagship” titles. Black Panther is very good, but very different in tone from the rest of the franchise. I have a feeling they’re going to have a hard time keeping it going after the movie comes out.
And the point about people following artists and writers is especially true and something that Marvel either doesn’t get, or doesn’t want to encourage with their books as it puts them in a harder position. Jessica Jones is a prime example where it has a consistent, very good team that Marvel has given alot of freedom to because it’s Bendis. I wish they would try to do more titles like that, but I don’t see that happening, which is why Image will still win out artistically. A prime example of that is Monstress which is up for the Hugo and is the same team that started out as X-23 back in the day. Marvel could have had something like that in house every year, but they don’t choose to run their company that way.
Some random thoughts from someone who worked a bit on the distribution/retail side in the 90s (Friendly Frank’s Distribution, for you really old timers …)
1) When I worked the FFC shop there were a lot of families that would come in and basically walk right out as the shelves were covered with only one kind of comic: ultra-violent looking with a good chance of having a semi-pornographic female representation on the cover. Same at the warehouse: so much of the inventory was one-note male power fantasies. And while male power fantasies are a market, somehow comics came to be dominated by that market.
2) I have kids now, and when they want comics I don’t go to the comic shop down the road (literally down the road) I drive to the big box book store in the mall becasue I don’t want my kids exposed to that attitude, and I want to spend my money on stories with a beginning, middle and end for the boys. My kids read a lot, but since they don’t buy from a Diamond supplied store, Marvel et. al. don’t seem to think they matter and thus more and more of their comic reading is given over to manga.
3) People like to see themselves in their art. It’s a natural human instinct and it’s okay. We all have our imaginations and want to be the hero of the story even if it’s only in our imaginations. Seeing someone like us can help draw us into the story. By not having stories written from different perspectives, the comic industry is cutting itself off from that basic human nature. By doing so, they make it less likely that whole swaths of potential readers will be enticed into reading the books. Lack of diversity is a piss poor business strategy, at least if growth is part of your strategy.
4)Marvel, DC are going to strangle themselves (at least from a book perspective.) if they insist on believing that Diamond supplied stores are the measure of success. The Black Panther and Vision books are the first comics I can remember in years that looked interesting to me. I am not going into the comic store and buy them individually; I am going to by them in a collection if I can find them. I represent a market; my kids’ represent a market that is likely to be more digital focused. People turned off by the atmosphere in many comic shops represent a market. Those markets can be served alongside the existing Diamond based market but only if the publishers recognize them. And those markets require different means of distribution, pacing and, yes, diversity of creators and stories.
5)I cannot believe the industry looks essentially exactly the same as it did 20 years ago. How are these people still in business?
@17: I highly recommend checking out the Valkyries website for inclusive comics shops. My shop has a Valkyrie co-owner and they’re great at giving welcoming recs. I love buying comics (even trades) from a shop rather than a bookstore bc they’re usually better at rec’ing titles. Even for kids.
I’ll tell you right now if I could have a decently priced subscription to a couple of comic books delivered directly to my house and not have to deal with crossovers I would do that. But if I was to subscribe to an Iron Man it would be Tony Stark. If I was going to subscribe to Captain America it would be Steve Rogers. Story arcs where somebody takes over the mantle like Sam are one thing. But when you’re going to replace a character I like or identify with or have followed for 50 years with a Latina lesbian with a similar costume and call it Issue Number 1, I’m out. I absolutely hate retcon characters.
Write a great Latina lesbian comic book with a great Hero and a good plot and a good story and I’ll be into that. Hulk is a great example of me checking out. Having another Gamma irradiated character that’s a Korean guy with a totally different worldview and personality is great. But don’t replace Hulk or call him the new Hulk just for the headlines. Come up with a new name. What’s the Korean word for Hulk? Pyeseon? Does that translate properly? Use that. And if it’s written better and drawn better and the creators behind it give it a better story it’ll sell better.
By the way I don’t know why Ms Marvel/Captain Marvel gets a pass for me but it does. I think it’s because I’ve never liked any of the Captain Marvel characters very much but Carol Danvers has always been fantastic. And the new Miss Marvel taking her spot after she was promoted up doesn’t feel cheap to me. And the character work is phenomenal. Although I’m not huge on the powers.
@19: Characters pass mantles around all the time and yet the only time I hear complaints is when those new characters are “diverse”. There have been 4 Flashes and a metric ton of Robins, but I guarantee if DC made a new Robin queer there’d be an Internet uproar, both good and bad. No one said boo when Dr Doom became Iron Man, but put Riri in the suit and suddenly it’s the death of comics?
Also, if you’re referring to America Chavez, she’s not Captain America and never has been. She’s her own character, Miss America, created in 2011. Gillen and McKelvie, if I remember correctly, were the first to write her as a lesbian. The only Caps rn are Steve and Sam. America didn’t replace or retcon any legacy characters.
So, color me a newb, but is there some reason Marvel/DC doesn’t count TPBs sold at bookstores/Amazon/Comixology? Are they not getting the data or are they just ignoring it? I am new to comics, I got into them just a couple of years ago via Buffy and have since subscribed to several series – but I wait for the TPB and most often purchase a digital copy first, then the TPB if I really love it.
I definitely agree with the point made about over-saturation. I looked into Marvel titles because I was intrigued by the new characters, but there were just too many options/storylines and cross-overs. I became overwhelmed to the point of giving up. Now all my comics come from either Image or Dark Horse.
Perhaps a monthly schedule is no longer viable as a comics publishing model. Certainly not at current prices per issue. I simply don’t see how kids could afford to buy comics these days. An entire generation is being lost, a time bomb for their business model. I used to spend 30-40 bucks a week on comics (2K to 2.5K annual), but could no longer justify it. The constant reboots, new number 1s, unending crossovers that fizzled and interrupted ongoing stories in regular books. One example is Marvel’s recent Civil War 2 that ripped off Minority Report’s plot of fighting future crime and seriously damaged the character of Carol Danvers/Captain Marvel.
Also, here’s Marvel’s Mr. Gabriel claiming he gets it: “Because when we put the catalogs together, we go out of our minds with, ‘Well, what’s going to go on the front cover? What’s going to go on the back cover? Which is the ‘event’ event? What’s the big event, and which is the ‘story’ event (that we don’t want to call, ‘story,’ because that sounds lame, and no one’s going to want to buy something that’s called, ‘Here’s a five‑issue story.”
That is simply dead wrong. It’s absolutely what I want. A story, with beginning, middle, end. This endless obsession with events meant to create artificial excitement that inevitably go off the rails. Get off the hype train, Marvel. Tell contained stories within ongoing titles. Stop rebooting with endless #1s. If the story is large enough, tell it in team books; that’s why they exist.
So, as to the main article: I’m not sure, since we are talking comics, what the point is to bring up film (or other media) as examples of popular diversity. Beauty and the Beast is currently the highest grossing film on the planet and even then, if you average out the domestic box office (North America) by the average ticket price, the film has been seen by less than approximately 17% of the available audience. Just looking at the US audience (as domestic includes the Canadian and Mexican theater box office), more people voted for the current electoral college elected American president than have seen the film. My point being that bringing this to the discussion is fruitless and doesn’t really say anything.
As far as sales, (1) trade paperbacks and graphic novels sales are counted. Unfortunately, for whatever reason, the NY Times is no longer going to run comic book trades/GN sales but the figures are still available on line. (2) Amazon, which bought Comixology, will not release the digital sales figures but you can be sure that all the comic book publishers are well aware of them. Also (3) the amount of pirating of comic books is very high for a niche market category. Books, for example, can be found in pirated versions, but are far harder to find say the top ten bestseller lists readily available to download with just a simple browser search.
Finally, while some of the information is anecdotal, Bleeding Cool does a regular (weekly) sales report of select comic book shops which is interesting. I personally take all of it with a grain of salt, but it’s interesting.
The flaw in Marvel’s approach is apparent when you see that they are concerned about their market share without anything being said about the state of the market. It is possible for market share to decline without losing any readers if the market is growing. Similarly, you can gain share in a declining market still be losing readers. If DC were to shut up shop tomorrow, Marvel’s market share would increase dramatically, but I’m not sure that would be good for the industry.
But it looks like Marvel aren’t even using accurate measures to gage their market share. If they are only looking at Diamond Distribution then they are ignoring a huge section of the market. It seems they are looking only at those readers who read comics through the most traditional method and saying “our readers don’t like change.”
Incidentally, I agree with pretty much everything in the article except this bit:
It seems to contradict the previous statement that diverse titles are selling well, if not necessarily through traditional channels. Secondly, its effectively endorsing Marvel’s position that their readers don’t like diversity, but simply flips it over to blame the readers. If we don’t accept the premise that diversity doesn’t sell, why grant it to make this argument?
I’m seriously stunned that they do not count trade sales as a measure of impact. Honestly, I wait for trades because I simply do not have the space to store single issues from the dozens of series I follow.
And I heartily agree with Kathy – I used to regularly buy 5-6 series in singles, but the “events” stopped me doing that. As soon as I would start to get invested in a character, new or old, an event would happen and send it off the rails. Matt Fraction’s Hawkeye run was fantastic – mainly because it managed to stay intact for 25+ issues. Now, if a series makes it to 12 issues without an “earth-shattering” change-up, it’s a miracle. Literally the only series I still read (and buy in singles) is Thor (both Jane and Odinson) because Jason Aaron has pretty much been allowed to stay in his own sandbox. Marvel needs to cut the events back to every 3-4 years, cut back the number of titles, and stop shifting the artists and writers around so much.
I like diverse casts, casts with the sort of mix of characters I can see on the streets these days -even in my very rural and old fashioned town-, but I hate badly written characters and when “diversity” is used as the gimmick. It all comes down to how well the character’s intro and story is written. A badly written character who seems like a gimmick (sorry, but this is Riri in the Iron Man suit here) is just bad, but a well written character (like Jane Foster-Thor or Kamala-Ms Marvel, or Spider-Miles) is a great story.
Of course it doesn’t help when a crossover comes crashing through and the issue ends with “this story concludes in [irrelevant title name here]”. That just seems like a rip off (and worse if you are buying trades, I have some old Power Girl trades and they contain three quarters of a story then a note to buy another title which isn’t even available in trades to see how it resolves; rip off) or is the whole status quo is ripped up to have some weirdo event happen then a reset button hit. That is just off putting.
It’s obvious what Marvel must do. Cancel _all_ of their long-running characters and replace them with Inhumans!
I credit the comic book Shop with getting my son to read. Some of their recommendations were out there for his age level…. I Hate Fairyworld and Hench Girl were his favorites. My son never once picked up a super hero comic.
Not once.
Hench Girl, tho? Had to go every time a new issue was out. Got his reading from 2 to 3 years behind to on track.
The problem isn’t diversity, never has been. I hope the industry can figure it out.
“meanwhile, The Great Wall, Ghost in the Shell, Gods of Egypt, and nearly every other recent whitewashed Hollywood blockbuster has tanked”
Of course, the problem couldn’t be those movies were badly-marketed or the public lacked interest in them. Which is likely the problem with most of Marvel’s comic offerings.
I was an avid collector in the 70s and 80s, stopped, and then checked back in with Comixology digital copies, notably the collected and omnibus titles, rather than the single issues. And then I consciously decided to check back out of Marvel and DC and check into other publishers because there is SO much crossover and so many characters that it’s really impossible to come in to titles. So I’m actually buying more and more digital titles, just not from Marvel–there is no place for me as a newbie/returning reader to feel like I’m not coming in at the middle and missing important back stories.
The problem is not that Marvel’s sales are plummeting because their customers do not like diversity. Maybe the new diverse Marvel universe should try to understand things like market target and customer’s base. But they’ll probably insist in adding more diversity and then not figuring out what was wrong. With their understanding of their own business they have better chances to sell unicorn’s coloring books in Army Ranger’s bases.
Lols. The reason people don’t buy comics now is that they pirate them. It doesn’t have anything to do with ‘diversity’ or whatever.
People like comics.
People like money.
So they take the comics without paying for them.
Trying to stop this by changing what is written in the comics, or who is writing them, is worse than futile.
You want your sales back, stop piracy. Can’t do that, they’ll keep going down.
Sounds like the same Marvel from 20 years ago and the same reasons why I stopped collecting Marvel books years ago. Nice to see some things never changed.
Just a minor correction. Great Wall isn’t an example of whitewashing. It is an example of a Chinese film trying to pander to a western audience. Unfortunately, it didn’t work.
@38: I get what you’re saying, but I was using “whitewashing” in a more general sense of taking what should be a vehicle for PoC and centering it instead on white people. Regardless of the filmmaker’s intentions, GREAT WALL became a Matt Damon movie rather than a movie about Chinese people.
@36: I didn’t blame piracy as the sole reason, but it is a factor. Across all mediums. Comics aren’t dying bc of piracy anymore than they’re dying bc of diversity. It took the music industry a decade and near collapse to figure out how to work *with* the digital revolution rather than against it. Hollywood (movies and TV) learned from them and have embraced streaming. Same with books and digital platforms (despite ebooks dropping in sales). Comics still doesn’t place enough value on digital platforms. And multiple studies and polls have shown that most people prefer to pay for things at a reasonable price and will stop piracy when given more price and availability options.
Great piece. I agree. And the grand crossover events are tedious, needless, and sad.
Me? At Marvel, I liked Hellcat under Leth, Squirrel Girl, Daredevil under Waid / Samnee, Hawkeye under Fraction, Wilson’s Ms. Marvel, and Tom King on Vision (Vision with a family? I’m a Dad. My sons and daughter read comics. This spoke to me). I was interested in the above, and not much else.
The books I name were new and fresh, almost (almost) in the way Saga is new and fresh, and Waid and Staples on Archie – that simply rocked; doubly so with Staples in tow; I miss her work.
Civil War II – you can’t get me into a store with a title like that. More Secret Wars? Thank you – but No. Just no. Secret Empire – Schmeecret Lamepire.
Stores? Love and respect the women and the little kids, too, whose taste you don’t like; don’t embarrass my loved ones when I’m not with them, because you are “edgy” and “comix ain’t just fer kidz” and you know the names of all the Robins. Wow, what a snobbery. And people hate booksellers?
Thank goodness, in Santa Monica, and Culver City we have some retailers who really do rock. Who invite people in … who don’t act like they have the special secret “comix gnosis” and everyone else is ruining their fun.
The old and the new can be written well, and are written well and often, but just maybe, just maybe the event is no longer a compelling cash grab.
Tom King writes a great Batman – and thank goodness it’s here now; but all the world changing epoch-changing total boredom; let’s not have SUPER ULTIMATE TOTALLY FINAL LAST ONE EVER GRANT MORRISON IMPALES THE DC UNIVERSE WITH A SPORK FROM KFC CRISIS REBOOT – ON CRACK, STARRING ALICE COOPER AND MEATLOAF WITH A WEIRD REFERENCE TO DOLLMAN! … ugh.
Tell a story. The story wins the fan. The character. Write and draw a great story. Be kind. Don’t blame fans for corporate-level missteps. Always remember too – the loudest complaint isn’t the only one. The happy folks have less reason to speak.
The “events” are endless. What next? Foil-wrapped covers. They’re killing their base by not doing something Dennis O’neil and Neal Adams just did for pay, without
My apologies – I believe my last posted piece trailed off with a bad paste. Best, folks! I’m heartened to see how many people value the same things in comics art.
Disclaimer: straight white cishet man here, I may not be the most sensitive.
Well, I’m entirely unsurprised that the management is this moronic. These are the same numbskulls who put that moron in charge of Sam!Cap who made Sam fight generic bomb-throwing “SJWs”, had that same idiot turn Captain America (a character who was literally created to punch Adolf Hitler in the face, whose first cover involved him punching Adolf Hitler in the face, and whose first issue was 48 straight pages of Nazis getting the living bejeezus beaten out of them) into a Nazi for a publicity stunt, and then had that same intellectual titan who thinks that “angry fans are good for business” put Magneto–a Jewish survivor of the Holocaust whose entire family was murdered by the Nazis and whose entire purpose in life is defined by his hate of the Nazis and drive to prevent his people being crapped on like that ever again–into a HYDRA (i.e. Nazi successors) uniform for a similar stunt.
Given that, and Joe Quesadilla–I mean Quesada–and his lasting impact of blatant incompetence (c.f. “One More Day” and the persistent inability for good Spider-Man stories to come out since then), coupled with advertising so poor that I literally didn’t know that “America” was happening until now, and this is par for the course for Marvel Comics and the Big Two as a whole (*cough* New 52 *cough* turned Starfire into a sex object *cough* yes I’m still angry about that *cough*) for the past 6-7 years.
Speaking of that bass-ackwards advertising, call me crazy, but seeing a woman go back in time to re-enact Captain America Comics #1 by punching Adolf Hitler in the face sounds awesome–in fact, I’m gonna try to get my hands on some of those “America” comics when I’m at Philly Comic-Con this weekend now that I know they exist. Have Kamala Khan go along with her and kick Reinhard Heydrich in the crotch while you’re at it. I’d buy the sh*t out of that, variant cover gimmicks and everything, and get trades to give to my non-comic-reading family and friends. While you’re at it, if Spider-Gwen and Deadpool can get together with Sam Wilson and fight some Skrulls or something or some guys who are plotting to spark hate crimes and racist strife or something, that’d be awesome. And hey! Maybe, just maybe, if Marvel Comics’ leadership grows a brain and a d*ck, they’ll fire that moron who made Cap a Nazi, retcon it all as the Red Skull’s evil mind-control, and have Cap break free because he’s a hero who loves everybody and hates bigotry and his entire purpose in life is socking on the jaw.
#givemebackmyCap #HaveCapPunchANazi
The way I see it, everybody deserves a comic-book icon who’s like them. Black kids, LGBT kids, boys, girls, everyone else. You should have a superhero who you can see as you. That’s just gorram fair. And hey! I get it, Marvel, you want to make money. That’s fine! The problem is, between your bass-ackwards advertising and impatience and persistent use of bad tropes, you’re not tapping into a massive market that isn’t buying your stuff because you keep pulling stunts like Captain HYDRA and making that the focus of your advertising and not, say, “Kamala Khan saves the world with the power of friendship and turns a Nazi into a pretzel”, which sounds a lot more entertaining.
The other problem is, you’ve effectively brought the ’90s back. That market oversaturation is a thing. Your constant crisis crossovers are actually hurting your market because people don’t want to buy a comic because it could get a crossover and a clumsy retcon after 6 issues.
So my advice, Marvel, is to place an explicit moratorium, a public moratorium, on crisis crossovers or world-changing events for 5 years. Fire the Captain HYDRA idiot. Have maybe 6 flagship superhero lines (Avengers (keep a stable lineup–suggest Hawkeye, Iron Man, Captain Marvel, Hulk, Wasp, and Thor), X-Men, Captain America (Steve–SamCap is great but we need Steve Rogers purified of bad writing, back in his suit, and punching Nazis in the face ASAP), Ms. Marvel (b/c Kamala rocks), Spider-Man (after retconning One More Day), and Deadpool), and no more than 12 lower-level comics (This new “America” comic, Spider-Gwen, Black Panther, Great Lakes Avengers, a secondary X-men comic, Guardians of the Galaxy, anything else that sounds good–maybe Sam Wilson gets a new superhero team for himself?). Have single-issue special crossovers between 2 comics for special occasions, keep better records of digital copies (and focus on selling more digital copies for that matter–you can reduce production costs and still make a bigger profit while giving the customer a discount), and don’t retcon anything that doesn’t actively enrage the entire fanbase for 5 years.
After that, if your sales are still below what you want, then I’ll step back and say, OK, try your big stupid action crossover. It’s been 5 years, after all, people might be ready for one again.
It is not diversity it economic. In 1970 min wage $1.45 and comic $ 0.20 or 14% one hour work. Now comic $ 4.99 min wage $7.25 to $11.00, comic cost now 45% to 69% of one hour work. Comic should cost $1.00 to $1.54 to equal cost 14% of one hour work. Lower price sell more work every time.
Did I have a comment removed by the moderators? I’m not sure that it was actually posted as I am not very good at the internet. If so, could you please tell me what specifically I did wrong so that I can avoid it in the future?
I have a great deal of respect for Ms. Brown and I often enjoy her articles. Anything even slightly disrespectful to her, or anyone else for that matter, was not my intention and I sincerely apologize. I may disagree with you, but I would never be intentionally rude.
Thank you very much for your time.
I used to collect Marvel comics, back in the late 1980s – early 1990s. I followed the X-men (picked up about the point where they got their base in Australia… yeah, I’m Australian).
I quit collecting Marvel comics for a number of reasons. Firstly, they stopped being sold in the newsagents here in Australia (which meant I would have had to go into the one and only comic store I knew of in Perth at the time, which wasn’t a particularly welcoming atmosphere for me as a young woman). Secondly: the crossovers. I started getting upset when I was being expected to track a particular crossover story across about seven different titles (and the one which sticks with me here is “Inferno”) and I was only really tracking two of those seven. Yeah, sure, it introduced me to another bunch of characters, but really… I wasn’t interested in the effort required to chase all those titles just so I could follow one story-line. Thirdly: Rob Liefeld. I believe that should suffice as a reason. So about a year or two out from “Inferno”, I just quietly stopped buying comics altogether.
Marvel lost my money, the local newsagent lost my money (not only from me not buying comics, but also from me not buying clear plastic ring binder sleeves to store my comics in), all the people in the supply chain between the newsagent and Marvel head office lost my money, and I haven’t gone back.
I was thinking about it with the growth of the new titles (I’ve seen a lot of good reviews of the Matt Fraction “Hawkeye” series, and the Kamala Khan “Miss Marvel” also got a lot of good reviews, too) . However… I’m on a low income, and I’m low on spoons. I prefer to get my entertainment with minimal peripheral bullshit – and in my opinion, Marvel’s manufactured dramas (either the “reboots” or the crossovers or the cross-title battles and so on) are pure, unmitigated nonsense.
Congratulations, Marvel. Better hope your cross-promotion activities are bringing in a fair old wallop of cash, because the only way you’re getting money from me is through “Avengers Academy” (at best) these days. There are fanfic writers who write the characters I want to read about in a way I want to see them (I like old-style leftie Steve Rogers, thanks very much), and it doesn’t cost me a cent extra to read it on AO3.
@49/Blake Harrison — Please re-submit your comment? I don’t see anything pending on our end, so this may just be a temporary glitch.
I’ve never been a big reader of Marvel’s main titles, but what soured me on them completely was them retconning Mary-Jane and Peter Parker’s marriage. It became very apparent to me at that point that nothing in these comics would ever reach a satisfying conclusion because anything could be rewritten or changed on the whim of the current writer or editor. In the end, the Marvel Universe is like a soup opera in which none of the characters can age, die or quit and so it continues endlessly with its manufactured dramas.
That’s why I stick pretty exclusively to Manga these days. For the most part, a series is produced by a single creative team and when it ends it ends. Even the rare spin offs don’t tend to tread on the toes of their parent series. New writers generally produce their own series. Plus the industry isn’t utterly obsessed and dominated by a single genre.
In 1975 a Marvel comic had been cancelled and running reprints for several years. Then, Marvel canned the old, all white, all American cast and replaced them with a team of new characters who were “All-Different” nationalities. Marvel also let one writer write the book for about twenty years.
That book was Uncanny X-Men. You might have heard of it.
Admittedly, this new cast was more multi-national than multi-racial. Within a few issues, Storm was the only person of color on the team–and also the only woman, at least until Jean Grey was written back in (with many more women to come–the book was eventually known for it’s female characters). Even so, the book was far more culturally diverse than it had been, and it became arguably the most successful comic ever.
My mind always goes right to this example whenever I hear the tired argument that diversity doesn’t sell.
@50: Moving comics from grocery stores and news stands happened on the US in the 1960s and 1970s, but with the same result, namely the loss of women buyers. Comics shops were heavily white and male both behind and in front of the counter, not to mention writing them. I tried radio comics in the 1990s bc I loved the cartoons, but not only did I have no access to them as a kid, the ones I could get from my friends’ older siblings were hideous toward women. Took me until about 5 years or so ago to get back in, and it was Kelly Sue DeConnick’s that hooked me.
There’s still a lot of crap, but I suggest 2 things. 1. Check out my Pull List column: http://www.tor.com/tag/pull-list for good titles worth your time. 2. There’s no need to buy comics when you can get trades at your library for free! Stop by your local or check your branch system. Libraries here anyway often have a graphic novel section, and I bet Aussie libraries do too.
I am pretty new to the comic book world and only just started picking up books like Deadpool, Saga and The Wicked + The Divine. But as a voracious consumer of pop culture and literature, I don’t think the problem with Marvel books not selling is diversity. I think it’s more a matter of representing characters in a way that’s authentic and realistic.
From what I’ve read of Marvel books so far, they tend to follow the same old super hero clichés with ethnically diverse characters shoehorned in somehow. I get the feeling they include these characters simply because they want to appeal to a diverse audience but not because these characters are interesting in and of themselves, just part of a demographic checklist. Even so, that’s not what’s going to stop me from reading a good novel or comic book.
The deciding factor for me is not if the character is white or black or ethnic, but if they’re represented in a realistic way that reflects actual human interaction and real people in society. And guess what, real society is culturally diverse! It would be pretty great if we could have more comics that reflect that.
So a couple more thoughts:
NOT AT ALL sure why people think trades are not counted in sales. Diamond tracks and releases this information to the publishers and this information is also publicly available – that link to Comichron has plenty of other resources which are interesting to the folks who might be interested in actual figures.
Secondly, for the people who have fallen out of comic books but might want to check them out, your local library might have them to be borrowed. I’m lucky in that I live in a large metropolitan area and I can pretty much find any trades that are out there either on line via the library (I wasn’t aware that Hoopla has comics on their site, I’ll have to check that out) or physical copies to borrow.
Finally, Comixcology has an Unlimited Service that’s reasonably priced per month (comparable in a fashion to Netflix) where folks can find comics from a number of publishers. People should also specifically check the CMX Submit, which are creator owned, generally web only (not physically available in any kind of store) that have highly diverse creators (writers and artist) doing works that range from horror, to slice of life, to web comics and so much more – and for people with kids, they also have a number of family friendly, kid oriented titles on CMX and specifically on CMX submit. Folks should check it out. I believe it’s still currently free to try for 30 days.
@58: I guess I wasn’t very clear about my trades and sales comment. Yes, the total financial figures are available, but I have yet to find a way to see which trades are selling what numbers. For example, how many MOON GIRL trades sold last year to comic shops versus non-comics shops, rather than an aggregate sales figure across all trades? If you can find that data, I’d love to see it. ICv2 offers some collection of data, but you have to pay to access it.
Second, regardless of the number of trades sold, Marvel itself doesn’t place the same value on trades as they do on issues. Marvel got into selling trades later than other publishers and often over inflates the price to make as much or more than the per issue price. According to Gabriel they’d rather make money off issues than trades: “Two things there, if those prices came down (and this is more on what we call our in‑line trades, our monthly trades), we’re going to run the problem that people are going to jump from the comics just to the trades, because the trades are going to be 50 percent cheaper to buy than the comics.” Marvel (and DC) place more weight on how many issues sell and far less weight on the number of trades sold. A lot of the new wave fans don’t necessarily want to subscribe to an endless run of issues. I often buy the first issue to decide if it’s worth continuing, then either trade wait or collect the first arc and then trade wait. It’s got to be a damn good comic – or a comic I really want to support – for me to keep the issues on my pull list. For Big Two $3.99 superhero issues offer a ton of ads and little to no backpage content, whereas Image’s BITCH PLANET gives me amazing comics *and* essays on intersectional feminism for $3.50 an issue. You can probably guess who’s going to get my money.
Now, that’s not to say Marvel is wrong for putting more value on issues than trades or that buyers are wrong to trade wait. The Big Two need to figure out how to attract the growing number of trade waiters or else keep leaving money on the table. They can’t win the battle against trade waiters. Either they learn to work with them or they lose those readers entirely.
Responding to wlangendorf (and agreeing with AlexBrown) piracy is a market failure. It is a result of products being either not available, not available in a format consumers want and/or for more than they want to pay. While companies would like to think that piracy can be “stopped” by legal means, the only way it really can be stopped (or prevented) is by addressing the market failure.
I have to say that when I was in my formative comic book reading years I never had problems being a woman in a comic book shop (and now I am old enough that I don’t really give a darn). Or I may have just lucked out – thank you to The Zone and The Great Escape in Louisville, KY. My issue with the comic book shops I have been in recently has been that most of them are disorganized messes. I’ve ended up online or at bookstore buying trades because I could at least find what I was looking for there.
Alex, I spend time on sites that discuss comics, and I’ve seen numbers on trade sales. The publishers do sell directly to buyers (for example, libraries). The New York Times, which just recently gave up the Graphic Novel Best Seller list, also saw numbers (I remember seeing them for Superman Unchained Deluxe and for the Superman and Batman Earth One volumes). That includes stores that aren’t strictly Diamond LCS buyers.
Trade paperbacks sell at quite a bit less than floppies do. The Deadpool Back in Black collected mini sold some 10K trades whereas Deadpool’s issue sold in February shipped some 38K copies. Deadpool Duck sold 20K copies.
Here’s another site that regularly parses these numbers – as you can see, Batman’s book sells in the 100K+ copies but the collections of even a character considered a sure fire success are still in the 10% of the single issues. On the other hand, of the 1B+ the industry made in sales, 500M+ was in Graphic Novels.
Marvel has a horrible rep among readers for the trades. They never provide any extra content, if they show a variant, they will run 3 or 4 on a standard page size and rarely are their any models, drawings, scripts, etc. Many people say that reading a Marvel trade is like reading the floppies stuck together, especially since Marvel has that unfortunate habit of keeping the last page (‘next month in ____’) IN the trades, which falls immediately before the self-same image as the actual cover of the following issue. DC, on the other hand, has long had a healthy trade sales and could survive easily and profitably based purely on catalog sales. DC also has a far larger catalog sale share than any other publisher.
I’ve been reading comics since Peter Parker and Gwen Stacy were first dating. A comic cost 12 cents in those days. A Matchbox car cost 45 cents, as did a paperback book. The toy car now costs about 79 cents, not quite double what it used to cost. The paperback book is a good bit more expensive, and now costs $7.99. But the big increase in price is the comic book that now costs $3.99. Heck, the Spider-Man #25 special issue cost $9.99, which is about a bazillion times as expensive as they used to cost. Comic books are just too darned expensive these days, and you just can’t blame inflation.
But even worse than that are the cross-overs and special events. No one has time to develop a story arc, because two or more times a year, they’ve got to drop what they are doing, and do a tie-in issue. And unless you buy a truckload of books, the special events are difficult to follow. And Civil War II was just a hot mess. The set-up for the first Civil War crossover was contrived enough, but this one never felt real–it felt like characters were just hitting their marks, not behaving in a way that made sense. The massive Secret Wars completely turned the Marvel universe on its head, and instead of being a jumping on point for new readers, I think a lot of people decided to jump ship.
I think the new characters Marvel is putting out there are very compelling, regardless of gender and ethnicity. I very much enjoy Ms. Marvel, and Squirrel Girl is a delight. Dan Slott is doing a great job with Spider-Man. The X-Men have been OK, and should be even better now that the X-Men/Inhuman battles are over (another contrived “big event”). I’m not as happy with Captain America–I’m looking forward to the fact that the Secret Empire crossover will end this dumb “evilCap” storyline.
So, IMHO, there are two things killing Marvel sales, and neither is diversity; high prices, and too many disruptive crossovers.
I collected comics in the 80s, and stopped until two years ago when I started trying to buy comics for my daughter. That led me into reading a lot of Marvel’s “diverse” line. I love a lot of it, even though I was highly skeptical of what felt like pandering retconning. Instead, the authors did a great job of reimagining popular heroes with a new perspective – a female thor battling breast cancer! a female wolverine who was raised to be a killing machine! She-hulk as a goofy lawyer comic! Hellcat as a manga-inspired comedy! I love that stuff. I love that a lot of it pairs interesting art and stories that aren’t about fighting world-eating bad guys.
The problem, as is so well-stated here, is that there is too damn much. I can’t keep up. I can’t afford to keep up, and I do ok. Also, this thing where everything is a 5-or 10 issue series and then its on to the next one is super confusing for a newbie. There are like a billion iterations of every single title. If I want to read spider man, which one is it? If I want wolverine, which do I read? Which captain marvel? etc. etc. etc.
Also, as so many have said here, I want STORIES. I do not want cross-arcing mega events about confusing shit that I don’t care about. I want Matt Murdock dealing with being disbarred and his drug addicted girlfriend. I want 5-10 issue story arcs, or really cool one-issue stories. I don’t want to have to have a PhD in the marvel universe to follow what is going on. And I really, really don’t give a shit about continuity. I don’t need multiple earths. I don’t need you to explain why stories written fifty years ago no longer apply to today.
Oh, and I think some sort of rough consistency with the Marvel Cinematic Universe would make sense. Lots more folks see the movies than the comics, but then when they go to a store, they find a world on the page that has only vague congruence with what they have seen in the movies. The movies could be a gateway for a lot of people to discover the world of comic books, but don’t seem to be doing that.
And the stakes need to be smaller. When every series and every adventure deals with THE FATE OF THE WORLD, IF NOT THE WHOLE UNIVERSE, NOT TO MENTION THE ENTIRE MULTIVERSE, the reader begins to become fatigued. There is a lot of drama to be found in stories with a smaller scope. There are so many ‘big’ stories that they have become meaningless.
Marvel’s next bit “Event” ought to be that it goes five years without an “Event”, because “Events” are so commonplace they are now the everyday. They could even play with it, with characters getting hypervigilant because they’ve gone six months without reality puking on itself or a giant Outside Context Villain not showing up and being all antsy about something not happening to rip their lives apart. Let them slowly get used to things being everyday (well as every day as you get when you are a costumed superhero fighting guys who have sharks for heads and suchlike) and then BLAM! hit with a real event. Sucker in the characters and readers together, when the status quo really does feel like the status quo.
Make it a thing that events are events because they are rare events, again. Of course it means nobody gets to dick with the timeline or retcon away their least favorite character (or kill off characters they don’t like out of petty spite) for a while. I could live with that, but could the writers? Could the marketing department, they gotta justify their job somehow?
Comic book readers, don’t hate diversity, they hate changing established characters for the sake of diversity. Marvel has a large enough roster of characters of virtually every racial, ethnic, and national background, that they could bring to the forefront instead of changing established characters.
I think the recurring themes here are “printed comics have become too expensive” and “too many crossovers into too many books”.
As a cis het white male, my all-time favourite marvel characters are Steve Rogers and Tony Stark. I’m 42, but I managed to get my hands on every issue of Iron Man from issue 12 (I felt such a thrill when I found a copy that was actually in my price range!) up to when they turned him evil for the first time (and didn’t even have him as the mastermind, but a stooge of Kang). I picked up a few more issues, but realised they’d run out ideas for him when they turned him into a teenager.
About the same time the price had begun to disproportionately increase. I understand the economics. Stan Lee would “write” a bunch of titles, while the comics I stopped reading had better production values, at the cost of employing individual writers and paying a fair wage to the rest of the creative team.
It seemed obvious to me that the broad strokes of characters were being dictated by the accountants’ focus groups. When I went to the comics markets, I started looking in the “cheap” boxes for limited-run and cancelled comics. Those frequently featured PoC characters as part of the accountants’ tick box, but the creative teams were otherwise given free reign. Sometimes this resulted in some cringe-inducing stories, sometimes you got some good stories. The characters got to evolve (and keep their evolution instead of the reset button getting clicked). Rarely did they get wrapped up in the cross-over events.
Today, the only time I’ve set foot in a comic-book store is Free Comic Book day. I read webcomics (Girl Genius, Strong Female Protagonist, Schlock Mercenary, Darths and Droids). I also pay small amount to access Marvel Unlimited. And again I avoid the “big names” and look for the limited runs and cancelled comics. Some of them are bad, but the percentage that aren’t cringe-inducing has become thankfully tiny. I read (and enjoyed) the new Ghost Rider before he got conscripted into AoS, so I’m glad he’s getting a wider audience.
I think Marvel are holding into an outmoded business model, and blaming everything (like diversity) but that business model went reality fails to match it. Kodak created the first digital camera, but didn’t market it because 90% of their income came from processing camera film. Marvel are trying to keep the loyalty of their printed comics retailers, when they are a doomed and dying breed. If someone like me is consuming they content on-line, and like diverse titles because I find them entertaining, ignoring that is like Kodak ignoring digital media