The Four Color Media Monitor

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: Captain America, Iron Man, islam and jihad, marvel comics, msm propaganda, politics, sales, Thor