The Four Color Media Monitor

Breitbart's technology section wrote about how Marvel and DC's audience is becoming fed up with all their hectoring, yammering politics shoved without mercy into their modern products, including the female take on Thor, on which they make the following point:

The dialogue mirrored most sane reader’s thoughts during the issue, but we’re not all monsters. We are just loyal, long-time readers who are sick of our favorite characters being butchered by nose-ringed lesbians for the sake of diversity, and at the apparent expense not just of dialogue, story and creativity but also, it now appears, the commercial success of Marvel’s comic books line.

[...] Your mileage may vary on Trump disses. Plenty of readers will have smirked along at jokes made at The Donald’s expense. But increasing customer frustration at obscure third-wave feminism preoccupations shoehorning their way into Marvel’s comic books is starting to have an effect on sales. It turns out you can’t bully people into caring about “microaggressions.”

And from the most recent sales charts, it looks like Captain America: Steve Rogers hasn't sold through the roof either. They have only their sleazy, dishonest approach to marketing to blame for that one. First they make it sound like Steve's background was retconned into an evil man, then it turns out he was brainwashed after all, yet that doesn't mean the audience was wrong to feel angry. There are readers out there who realize just how crude and deceptive both Marvel and DC's executives have become, and became discouraged, turning to smaller publishers instead. Just about any and all of their new series today are plagued by their nasty little insults to the audience from a SJW-viewpoint:

“[A lot of misogynistic filth]”, “[Red Pill MRA Meninist Casual Racism]”, and even “[Unsolicited Opinions on Israel???]” were all speech captions in Angela: Queen of Hel, a Marvel comic that was cancelled after failing to set the world alight earlier this year. The comic started with nearly 40,000 sales on its first issue, but dropped to just below 25,000 on its second.

By the third issue, Angela: Queen of Hel was at just above 20,000 sales, and by the last issue, issue seven, just over 14,000 people bought a copy. That’s right: the comic lost over half of its audience within seven issues.

Is that because the comic industry hates women? Or could it perhaps be because readers don’t appreciate being bludgeoned to death with student politics — and because social justice warriors tend not to put their money where their mouth is.

Just what I've thought for a while: even SJWs aren't buying their comics - they're just taking up careers as troublemakers, complaining and complaining and complaining about lack of what they consider required steps for superhero and other mainstream comics, but in reality, they don't care to buy this stuff; just force it upon the more sensible audience and laugh at all the harm they're

In any event, we must still consider that those sales numbers are pure snoozers. Even movies with poor box office results still sell millions of tickets compared with the hilariously awful numbers of paltry thousands comics are getting. Something that Breitbart's writer should stress as well.

They've mentioned Tony Stark's "diverse" replacement, and bring up the character design:

[...] a fifteen year-old black girl with an Afro and hooped earrings.

Thinking back on this, and recalling the artwork I've already seen, they sure are reaching for stereotypical designs. After all, Afro-hairstyles haven't exactly been in style much since the early 1980s, and hoop earrings probably haven't been either. Why indeed would they want to give this new cast member a style that may not be popular now?

They also remind us that DC's not innocent either:

Other comic book publishers are hardly saints, of course. In an issue of DC’s Wonder Woman last year, the popular female superhero complained about a villain “mansplaining” to her before an ally punched him in the face for the crime. “The lasso compels truth, but it can’t stop mansplaining,” declared Wonder Woman as the “bad guy” had his teeth knocked out of his mouth.

And they actually began the whole diversity mishmash a decade before Marvel did, with an Asian Atom, a Black Firestorm and a Latino Blue Beetle. Yes, that was another of the paths they used Identity Crisis for setting up. Even now as they've published Rebirth, it'd be foolish to think they're cutting out that PC garbage.

“We’re seeing the worst falloff of Marvel and DC sales in the store’s 38-year history,” complained one comic book store owner in an industry forum. “Both companies are losing established readers who no longer feel that the company’s output reflects the sort of comics they enjoy.

“For the first time in store history, yesterday’s Marvel FOCs saw us ordering single digits on more than half of the line items in the Marvel section.”

Marvel’s readership is souring particularly fast. With the exception of some big-name comics whose characters have, thus far, escaped the SJW purge of anything remotely resembling a straight white male, Marvel readers are simply going elsewhere.

And they're doing the right thing to abandon ship. If there's anything from Marvel/DC they should buy, it's the older books from the Golden/Silver/Bronze Ages, where the writing quality is far better, and violence is far from graphic like today.

Here’s a newsflash for Marvel: race-baiters and gender warriors who complain endlessly about the “lack of diversity” in comic books don’t buy comic books. They’re interested in identity politics, not fun.

When your customers — lifelong comic fans — pick up the latest issue to find a smorgasbord of irrelevant, hectoring social and pop culture commentary, they probably won’t buy the next issue. Not because they’re sexists and racists, but because the stuff you are publishing sucks.

People read comic books to escape the real world, and readers have had enough of being called privileged cis white men, or misogynist MRAs, in the real world, let alone the one place they get to escape it. If you want to put these things in your comic books, go ahead, but readers are just going to stop buying them.

And it's hilarious how the publishers and their assigned writers/artists are bent on making the readers look like sexists and racists, but won't ponder whether they're wallowing in the same thing, as seen in 2004 with Identity Crisis and Avengers: Disassembled, among several other books they've published since. As I've said before and will again, if that's what they're going to do, it shouldn't be a shock when it turns out they're employing sexual harassers and assaulters to boot, or vice versa. Towards the end, they say:

...there’s trouble on the horizon, not just for the studio’s core intellectual property, but the creative integrity of its work, too. Serves them right.

Yup. All their mistakes of yesteryear are coming back and biting them, and sooner or later, it will bring them down altogether. It won't be a great day, but it will be a mercy upon the intellectual property.

Labels: Atom, dc comics, Iron Man, marvel comics, misogyny and racism, politics, sales, Wonder Woman