I’m 56 and haven’t read comic books since I was in college. For that reason, my preferences mean nothing to Marvel or D.C. today. They can and should change or kill off my old favorite characters without worrying what I think- they CAN’T lose me as a buyer because I stopped buying long ago.
A female Thor sounds stupid to ME, but who cares about me? Marvel should be worrying what current readers think. Do CURRENT fans like the female Thor? Doesn’t look that way.
A Muslim Ms. Marvel sounds like PC silliness to me, but I don’t matter. Do current comic book buyers like the idea? Doesn’t look that way.
IF Marvel and D.C. are truly trying to expand their appeal to people underrepresented in earlier comics, that makes sense. The big question is, are they actually reaching those potential readers?
Sometimes a business says, in effect, “Screw our real, actual, flesh and blood paying customers. We want an entirely different customer base.” Sometimes that’s necessary and even desirable. But it’s unwise to flip the bird to your paying customers BEFORE you have tangible new paying customers .
Creating new female or minority heroes MIGHT bring in new readers. But changing old favorites into women or minirities merely alienates current fans without necessarily bringing in new fans.
I haven’t bought a Captain America comic since the 80s, so Marvel doesn’t have to fear losing me. I was lost long ago. Marvel could have Steve Rogers announce he’s always been a woman and ask to be called Stephanie, for all I care. But a restaurant that changes its entire menu takes a big risk. If you shove your customers out in pursuit of ostensibly better customers, you may end up with NO customers. A comic book company that revamps its roster of characters takes the same chance.
Wasn’t the case back in 2014, when it was a huge hit. Can’t find more modern figures, but from what I can tell, it’s not exactly experiencing a huge slump since then.
For a moment I was confused how this sort of thing constituted “flipping the bird” to someone. Then I remembered HEAT, and how comic book fans are among the most entitled, insular, whiny jerks in all of nerd fandom, and I just feel disappointed.
Actually one of the very few comics I follow currently (came for the hype, stuck around for the stories/characters. It is on the lower level of “taking itself seriously.”)
Changing the premise of a character or creating a new version is “flipping the bird”? That says much more about the person saying that than it does a comic book publisher.
What sales figures are you looking at the conclude that it “doesn’t look that way”? And, when you present those figures, please let us know what sales volume would lead you to conclude that the current fans DO like these things.
Peoples’ distaste for change, any kind of change, is well documented. Especially when it comes to established characters. When Daniel Craig was announced to be the new Bond there was a stink about how 007 was not supposed to be blonde. Would accusations of racism be appropriate here as well?
Comics have a tenuous relationship with the concept of continuity, so having constant characters can be important for keep people invested.
Wertham was the culmination of a decade-long trend. The actual trigger was the formation of the Comics Code Authority (CCA) also in 1954. It had the same effect on comic books that the Hays Code had on movies after Joseph Breen became its enforcer in 1934. Stories had to be submitted to the Code office in advance to ensure compliance, which was signaled by the Code seal on the cover of the comic. Without the seal, no distributor would touch the comic, effectively killing it.
According to a Dec. 29, 1954 New York Times article, “New Comic Books to be out in Week,” the CCA studied 440 issues from 285 different publications. 126 stories were rejected as unsuitable and 5656 individual panels bluepenciled. You could say that Wertham was the immediate trigger for the Code, but huge amounts of other pressure was being put on, as shown in the above link.
I’m assuming you mean Disney today, but back then Disney, which used Western Publishing’s Dell line to distribute its comics announced very loudly that its comics had always been 100% pure and didn’t need the Code seal. They got away with it. Nobody else would. EC Comics was a target for the Code and went out of business in 1955, leaving only Mad, which became a magazine to escape the Code. The industry as a whole, save Disney, was in severe trouble.
DC went looking for the most innocuous possible topics post-Code. That’s why they launched Showcase, to see what, if anything, would work in the new atmosphere. Their timing happened to be perfect to catch the first flush of the vastly increased potential audience of baby boomers, the first of whom turned ten in 1946. Marvel was just as lucky to catch the wave of cultural change in the 1960s. Their success exactly paralleled that of the Beatles, who started with an audience of 13-year-olds. Both kept their audiences as they aged and at the same time matured their product to appeal to older teens and college-aged audiences. Instead of hitting a hard ceiling at the end of high school and needing to turn over users every four years, rock music and comics were now for the first time something that could stick around forever.
But both rock and comics hit a different limit later. Younger audiences found new types and genres of entertainment they didn’t have to share with older fans, while adults could expand their entertainment in multiple ways. Comics and rock became nostalgia trips to dying audiences as those same baby boomers now age out of being prime entertainment buyers.
In addition to Budget Player Cadet’s point that the Thor title has sold better with female Thor than the male Thor title before it, keep in mind that Ms. Marvel (and some other similarly-aimed titles like Unbeatable Squirrel Girl, and Moon Girl & Dinosaur) sell disproportionally better in the trade market than the singles market. So yeah, while the 30 and 40 year old guys who are going to the local comic store every week might not be buying them, they’re still selling.
Let’s look again at the sales link I posted earlier. In March 2017, Ms Marvel volume 1 was in 231st place for trade paperbacks, with 531 sold. None of the other volumes even make that list. I see that volume 5 was released mid-July 2016, so looking at the sales for August, Volume 5 moved 516 copies for 259th place one month after release. (The top 8 sellers for that month moved more than 6,000 copies each.)
Since this is entirely within the tangent, I’m going to spoiler bar my response:
[spoiler]
Thing is, though, there *are *a bunch of classic black artists I do really like:
Ray Charles, Sam Cooke, Bill Withers, Sade, Bob Marley, Sly and the Family Stone, P-Funk, Wyclef Jean, Minnie Riperton, Dorothy Moore, Lenny Kravitz, Fishbone, Tracy Chapman, and Kool & the Gang. Not to mention jazz greats like Art Blakey, McCoy Tyner, Hank Mobley, and Charles Mingus. I just don’t like the turn black artists have taken in recent decades, for the most part. (A lot of people over 40, like I am, feel that way about *all *newer music, but I do continue to find new artists I enjoy: they just tend to be white.)
I tried the artists you recommended. Janelle Monae didn’t do it for me. Santigold did, however. I added “Disparate Youth” to my library. Thanks! I also remembered when listening to it that there is a Rihanna song (“Desperado”) used on HBO’s *Girls *that I love. (It’s weird to think or talk about Rihanna, because my ancestors owned a plantation on Barbados until the 1830s, and therefore almost certainly enslaved some of *her *ancestors.)[/spoiler]
Those are only the numbers for the sales to comic stores, which as I said, sorta misses the point. As people like G. Willow Wilson have pointed out, the monthly market and book markets are diverging. The people buying comics like Ms. Marvel and Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur aren’t going to comic stores to buy them, they’re buying them at bookstores and Amazon.
Look at Amazon’s list of best sellers for Marvel graphic novels - yes, you’ll see it’s a lot of Star Wars, Wolverine/Old Man Logan, and some of the recent popular crossovers like Secret Wars or Civil War, but then you’ll also see Ms Marvel and Squirrel Girl and Moon Girl, which is disproportionately high (compared to how the singles sell). Notice there’s no trades for ‘normal’ runs of the X-Men comics, Iron Man, Thor, etc. The only ones seem to be Nick Spencer’s Captain America run, the Old Man Logan stuff, and Black Panther.
Yes, Disney today. Perhaps to re-distil the question: Has Disney had the same effect upon Marvel Comics’ editorial practices as an analogy to the Code’s effect on DC’s editorial practices?
On the other discussion in this thread it seems to me that this is correct:
a. I can not like 80s rap, and that is not an indicia of racism;
b. I can object to the introduction of minority characters to replace old established (and perhaps tired) characters, because I like the old established (and perhaps tired) characters. That is not racist;
c. BUT if I object to the introduction of minority characters to replace old established (and perhaps tired) characters on the basis that they are minority characters, then I am racist.
Is this correct? Was the shift to diversity “obvious”?
I’m not so sure, and that is because of the unexpected success of Marvel’s movies. Warren Ellis in his book “Come in Alone” (2001?) predicted the demise of the American industry because of the shrinking market. Marvel at that stage was a penny-dreadful listed entity which made its money out of commercialisation of its characters on lunchboxes and pyjamas. But the movies seem to have lifted the genre out of a cul de sac and back onto the mainstream highway. That was an oblique factor no one could have seen coming 15 years ago.
Is diversity necessary to attract new readers, when the movies have expanded the comic book market using the existing, mostly non-diverse characters?
Relevant input from Moviebob. Short version: it’s probably not about the comics themselves, it’s probably more about creating new characters or new versions of old characters for the movies, so that you can keep making Wolverine movies after Hugh Jackman retires or dies, or Iron Man movies after Robert Downey Jr. decides he’s done playing Tony Stark. And why not make those roles diverse?
Anecdotally, from friends who like those titles (including my daughter), they actively avoid brick&mortar stores, because of how they are treated by the staff and also the other CBGs hanging out there. Dibblette gets her fixes from trades in bookstores, not singles in CBG lairs.
“Toys new and old…loose and mint. Star wars, star trek, monsters ,GI Joe, He-man (for the fags), Godzilla, marvel, DC, Video game, horror. High end Bowens, Hot toys and sideshow direct dealer ! Non sport and sports cards (also for the fags)…autographs, sketches vintage and new. Ma We also buy from the public…everything we sell and more ! WE PAY CASH.”
Wow. Stay classy. Yeah, a lot of these may seem like small things. “Who are you buying this action figure for?” for example. But given the option to shop somewhere where one’s very existence is treated like a bizarre oddity, and people always assume you’re dumber than you are, I think many people would just as soon not.
So it shouldn’t be seen as a huge surprise that comic books aimed in no small part at the audiences so often treated like shit at traditional comic book stores would have a poor showing at said stores.
It doesn’t surprise me that there are shitty people in the world. It does surprise me that people running a comic book shop would be so allergic to money as to treat “new blood” customers like this. Just too much money coming in from the customers they already have?
This was the norm for so long that it really shouldn’t be surprising, IMO – think of Sundown towns (a few of which, like Vidor TX, still exist, though probably in a lesser form) – businesses would actively turn away black customers because they preferred racism to taking their money, to the point that black travelers needed detailed guides as to which routes were safe to take to find gas stations, hotels, and restaurants along the way that they could use.