Posted on 04/03/2017 7:41:29 AM PDT by C19fan
Marvel’s vice president of sales has blamed declining comic-book sales on the studio’s efforts to increase diversity and female characters, saying that readers “were turning their noses up” at diversity and “didn’t want female characters out there”.
Over recent years, Marvel has made efforts to include more diverse and more female characters, introducing new iterations of fan favourites including a female Thor; Riri Williams, a black teenager who took over the Iron Man storyline as Ironheart; Miles Morales, a biracial Spider-Man and Kamala Khan, a Muslim teenage girl who is the current Ms Marvel.
(Excerpt) Read more at theguardian.com ...
Likewise, diversity is fine & laudable - so long as it’s in context and relevant. Memes/ideas/values/axioms/philosophies tend to follow genetic lines; there’s nothing wrong with spreading & celebrating successful ideas, but there’s an “uncanny valley” where we get the uncomfortable sense that something is wrong about it when it’s artificially & incompletely forced.
Occurs to me: isn’t this “forced diversity” Marvel et al engage in under sociopolitical pressure from the Left precisely the “cultural appropriation” viciously condemned by the same Left?
Marvel ALWAYS had a stable of cool female and ethnic characters. There is no reason they could not have emphasized those existing characters more, in more relevant storylines, or added totally NEW characters. Instead, they blithely erased long-loved characters in favor of the new images, or rewrote a conservative character to be a secret Nazi agent all his life. Its things like THAT which have put an end to almost all of my Marvel purchases.
Bashing America is never a good business plan.
Exactly.
Adding female or culturally diverse characters, no problem.
CHANGING existing heroes into women, muslims, gay, etc., charactors, BIG PROBLEM.
Want a female “Iron Man”? Add one, don’t change one.
Yep, queers so not sell to main stream people. Only the fringe and you cut off the majority of your readers. That spells low sales.
It isn’t that they added diversity. It’s that they re-used existing characters.
Create new ones. There’s nothing wrong with a female super-hero. i don’t see people balking at Wonder Woman in the DC universe.
If you want to know why this happened, Jon de Larroz did the work. 30/30 of Marvel writers being leftist SJW. They got in and converged Marvel. Since SJW always double down, I suspect they will kill off and reboot the whole universe into their diverse utopia....and watch sales plummet more.
Comic books, like movies and other forms of entertainment, are a psychological escape from the stresses of reality and day-to-day life.
When one of those stresses becomes the central feature of that entertainment, it no longer serves its primary purpose for existence.
Declining sales were an easily predictable consequence of Marvel’s policy. Turns out that rebooting a superhero to make him gay doesn’t actually make him interesting, and makes it far less likely that comic book readers will be able to identify with him.
Look....I don’t deny their lifestyle....but I’m sick of hearing about their lifestyle every damn day.
When you shove it in my face, my face goes someplace else.
The only thing Marvel I’ve ever really liked was “Deadpool”, and that’s the least PC thing I’ve seen in years. The rest of it, meh.
CC
I agree totally. I don’t think people mind if it happens organically and natuarally, but this anti-white c crap shoved in our faces is what pisses us off.
captain obvious strikes again
No shiite, Sherlock! Why not go ahead with that special 4th of July issue where Captain America comes out of the closet, that’ll go over really well, donchya think?
People resent thinly veiled, ham-fisted preaching in their entertainment world.
Besides, Television and Non-Superhero movies are chock full of 97lb leather clad women beating up superbly trained, 250lb Special Forces types.
Seriously, would love to see the science on that...
2 things are driving fans crazy. 1) changes to existing established characters and 2) proliferation of non-value added alternate covers with no internal difference.
Oh almost forgot $6 and $9 books for fewer pages of less compelling stories.
Ping.
That’s business acumen right there. Nobody lesser could have predicted this. People not wanting their politics and their entertainment mixed? Nobody but nobody knew something bad could happen.
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