« Home | Comments by comics writers on Dallas shootings of ... » | It's not just Jim Rhodes: even Tony Stark's gettin... » | Milo Yiannapoulous reminds that comicdom is also a... » | Looks like Mark Hughes is still covering for the f... » | Marvel attacks Donald Trump by turning him into a ... » | Old Japanese school turned into manga academy » | The future of superhero movies looks like a crosso... » | It's clear they're delighted they offended people » | The worst way Marvel could troll the audience » | What some writers have to say about Brexit » 

Monday, July 11, 2016 

CNBC's ambiguous on whether PC diversity's helping Marvel

CNBC just asked - but didn't exactly answer - whether Marvel's overbearing diversity tactics are helping sales-wise. But they're predictably vague:
Marvel's introduction of Riri Williams, a 15-year-old black girl set to wear the mantle of Iron Man, is the latest character created by the comic book publisher as part of a trend to diversify its super-hero cast.

But is diversification having any impact on its bottom line?
If they'd look at the dismal sales numbers, or better still, give clear figures from charts, they'd see it's doing anything but improve their sales, which might sell relatively high for premiere issues, but take a huge dip with the subsequent entries.
In recent years, the Disney-owned company has taken several steps to introduce greater racial and gender diversity: in 2014, a black man became Captain America and Thor became a woman. The year before that, Marvel introduced Kamala Khan, a Muslim teenager, as the super-hero Ms. Marvel.
And the latter step was very obviously politicized. Besides, religion isn't the same as race or gender.
One reason for increasing character diversity is to expand Marvel's audience, according to Augie De Blieck Jr., a columnist at Comic Book Resources.
"Marvel has relied on an ever-dwindling population to market its books to. Overwhelmingly, that's white men now in their 30s and 40s, who were reading comics during the last comic booms," he told CNBC via email.
He told them that? That's like saying no Blacks or Asians ever read Power Man & Iron Fist, Black Panther, X-Men or even Cloak & Dagger. And it's ludicrous. If they looked around, I'm sure they'd find some veteran readers of Black/Asian/Latino descent who used to read their products, but got bored and gave up after Marvel sold out to commercialism, and abandoned talented scripting for the sake of publicity stunts like their recent examples. De Blieck's not helping fandom with that jumbled apologia.
"They need new people to market their comics to. With the boom in movie and television superheroes, there's an audience out there that craves this superhero material now. Those people aren't always being marketed to, like children, women, and insert your favorite ethnic minority in the United States here."
Most interesting to see he notes the children. Because despite kids being a market worth tapping into, Marvel's not campaigning for a new generation of youngsters under 18. And they're not really looking for ethnic minorities either; just quick bucks.
Research by Helena Wu in 2014 for Duke University suggests diversity does make a difference to sales.

Wu examined the impact of featuring female and ethnic leads on the sales of video games across four major genres.

"The findings show that while shooter and adventure games conform to the conventional pattern where female and ethnic characters contribute negatively to sales, RPGs (role-playing games) favor the inclusion of female lead characters and action games favor the inclusion of ethnic lead characters," she said in the report entitled 'Video Game Sales: Does Diversity Pay?'.

Along with the huge successes of the Marvel cinematic universe and other marketing decisions, the creative choice to diversify seems to be paying off for the company.
Not without citing sales charts it doesn't. Like I said, they don't seem interested in providing any figures, and that weighs against their report.

And I can't help thinking the claim video games involving ladies and ethnic minorities is dishonest too. Hasn't the reporter who published this dimwittery ever heard of Tomb Raider? He must be an anti-Gamergate screwball who's making the video game audience out to look bad. Point: a lot of video games are usually stand-alone products unconnected with serial fiction in books, and if they can introduce new women and folks of other races there, nobody's bothered so long as they don't tamper with previous creations.

However, at the end, De Blieck makes a statement that's a lot more honest:
Marvel controls around 40 percent of comic book market share in the U.S., according to the pop culture website ICv2. Also, the overall U.S. comic book market has grown in recent years: sales of comics were around $579 million in 2015, a year-on-year increase of 7.17 percent, according to figures compiled by comics history site Comichron.

However, this growth isn't due to the Marvel films turning movie audiences into new comic book readers, according to de Blieck.

"In many ways, the comics market has never been stronger, but that strength and growth isn't coming from Marvel and DC," explained de Blieck.

"The new readers are more likely to come from publishers like Scholastic, whose school book fairs create books that populate the New York Times best-sellers lists on a regular basis," he said. "TV shows that are focused on a single series, like The Walking Dead or Preacher, are also more likely to bring in new readers."
And the new readers are likely turning to the smaller publishers, realizing that DC/Marvel's attempts to draw them in come with superficial components only, and don't guarantee talented writing. It's clear not everyone's willing to let the Big Two take advantage of them with pretentious modern crud that doesn't come with long lasting values. So long as they keep up all this politicized nonsense, they'll only ensure new readerships come away discouraged.

Labels: , , , , , , ,

Oh great. David Walker- the guy who wrote the troubling Nick Fury story with baby Obama and #BlackLivesMatter- is announced to be writing "Occupy Avengers" which will be a political comic with Hawkeye at the center. Disgusting.

David Walker wrote that baby Obama tripe? To think I almost had a decent opinion of his writing until now. Ah, well.

Don't worry, DC isn't going to sit this out:

http://www.comicbookresources.com/article/dc-reinvents-classic-hero-as-young-black-man-in-vigilante-southland

I'm all for the Vigilante coming back -- Adrian Chase is going to debut in Arrow Season 5 -- and he is a political character as made by Wolfman and the Death Wish era, but I don't know if he's the best choice for the Black Lives Matter bolstering, especially in light of Dallas.

"And the new readers are likely turning to the smaller publishers, realizing that DC/Marvel's attempts to draw them in come with superficial components only, and don't guarantee talented writing. It's clear not everyone's willing to let the Big Two take advantage of them with pretentious modern crud that doesn't come with long lasting values. So long as they keep up all this politicized nonsense, they'll only ensure new readerships come away discouraged."

The Big Two had their chance, and they are pissing it away with their SJW idiocy. The fragmenting of the comic culture isn't a bad thing, per se. On the other hand, the fragmenting also means that DC/Marvel could drop the pretense and finally actively court the fashionable SJWs they've always wanted as a fanbase, yet SJWs won't support with their money, assuming they even have any. Just like the internet and Fox News broke the leftist monopoly on news, but it's hard to put back that screaming cultural marxist genie that's within most MSM reporters once he/she/it has been let out. Then again, as many point out, when leftism meets with failure, double down on said failure until it works out.

I don't want to be a old man before Marvel/DC finally figures out their problems, but I don't have much optimism there.

Post a Comment

About me

  • I'm Avi Green
  • From Jerusalem, Israel
  • I was born in Pennsylvania in 1974, and moved to Israel in 1983. I also enjoyed reading a lot of comics when I was young, the first being Fantastic Four. I maintain a strong belief in the public's right to knowledge and accuracy in facts. I like to think of myself as a conservative-style version of Clark Kent. I don't expect to be perfect at the job, but I do my best.
My profile

Archives

Links

  • avigreen2002@yahoo.com
  • Fansites I Created

  • Hawkfan
  • The Greatest Thing on Earth!
  • The Outer Observatory
  • Earth's Mightiest Heroines
  • The Co-Stars Primer
  • Realtime Website Traffic

    Comic book websites (open menu)

    Comic book weblogs (open menu)

    Writers and Artists (open menu)

    Video commentators (open menu)

    Miscellanous links (open menu)

  • W3 Counter stats
  • Bio Link page
  • blog directory Bloggeries Blog Directory View My Stats Blog Directory & Search engine eXTReMe Tracker Locations of visitors to this page  
    Flag Counter

    This page is powered by Blogger. Isn't yours?

    make money online blogger templates

Older Posts Newer Posts

The Four Color Media Monitor is powered by Blogspot and Gecko & Fly.
No part of the content or the blog may be reproduced without prior written permission.
Join the Google Adsense program and learn how to make money online.