Racing Turtles

Black Panther and Ms. Marvel Nominated for Hugo Awards Days After Marvel VP Blamed Them for Sales Slump

“These nominations come just days after Marvel’s Vice President of Sales, David Gabriel, went out of his way to blame Marvel’s lagging sales on comics—like Black Panther and Ms. Marvel—starring people of color and women. Suffice it to say that the optics of this whole thing don’t reflect well on the publisher, but the Hugo nominations send a telling message to Marvel about just how the public actually feels about its “diverse books.”

In his presentation to the Marvel Retailer Summit, Gabriel said that he and other executives heard from retailers that readers weren’t interested in change, despite the company’s many “fresh, new, exciting ideas.”

“What we heard was that people didn’t want any more diversity,” Gabriel said. “We saw the sales of any character that was diverse, any character that was new, our female characters, anything that was not a core Marvel character, people were turning their nose up against,”

While it’s true that Marvel’s sales have been steadily declining for some time now, the drop has been seen across its entire portfolio, not just with titles starring leads who aren’t straight, white men. Both Black Panther and Ms. Marvel have regularly charted as New York Times best sellers over the past few years and that isn’t by accident. It’s because of interest from communities of fans (like the body that makes up the Hugo Awards voting committee) who make the effort to critically analyze the titles despite the fact that Marvel doesn’t do the best of jobs when it comes to promoting them effectively.

Writing for The Guardian, JA Micheline correctly notes that while Marvel may have a handful of progressive characters, it doesn’t go out of its way to let new potential readers know about them in a meaningful way.

“Marvel seems to outright misunderstand capitalism when it largely limits its marketing efforts to comic-book shops – spaces that have historically been unwelcoming to marginalised people,” Micheline argues. “[I]t largely presents white male heroes to the public via its cinematic universe, then makes public comments that outright concede that its main interest is selling comics to white men.”

Read the full piece here

Read the full thread here

It’s also worth noting that comics sales numbers are wildly skewed. Rich Johnston of Bleeding Cool describes them this way:

So. 

1) Marvel doesn’t count digital sales.

2) Marvel doesn’t count international sales.

3) Marvel doesn’t count comics that are sold as trades in book stores or online.

4) Marvel only counts monthly issues of physical comics sold in stores. 

And that’s really not where they’re getting most of their sales from any longer. 

Not to mention that: 

5)  Comic book sales in general have been slumping for a while–at least if you only look at the monthly sales of physical comics sold in stores.

6) Most of Marvel’s money now comes from its movies, not its comics. 

7) Oh, and the potential readers who refuse to buy Marvel comics during the run of Secret Empire (i.e., the one with Hydra Cap)? That’s probably not helping sales, either.

But sure, Marvel. It couldn’t be that your business model is outdated, that the types of sales have changed, that your sales figures are wildly inaccurate, that monthly purchases of physical comics are just not as affordable for customers as they used to be in the 1980s and 1990s (especially since the cost keeps going up), or that some potential customers have been boycotting your comics for a year. 

No. Clearly all of your problems stem from diversity. Because that way, you don’t need to change your way of doing business or your attitudes.

Marvel blaming diversity for their lack of sales when in actual fact a LACK of diversity, a lack of PROMOTION of the diversity they do have and the fact that as storytellers and salesmen they are doing a SHITTY JOB at marketing their comics to the people who would be interested in them and writing some truly GARBAGE stories (Like the Civil War II crap or this Secret Empire nonsense) that puts people off bothering to buy them

Because that way they can use this scapegoating bullshit as an excuse to fill their comics with yet more heteronormative shit featutring yet more utterly tedious cishet characters, most of whom are all white

wait wtf they don’t count digital sales or trades

jfc

like how many different kinds of abhorrent and incompetent can they be

Right?

It’s 2017

SO MANY SALES come from digital sales and trade sales

Spacetwinks(some of you may know him from his Excellent 8tracks) provides a pretty exhaustive rundown of all that’s wrong with Marvel’s argument in his name-your-own-price essay, Shut the Fuck Up, Marvel.

Actually, you know what, let me elaborate on this. This is Shock Value storytelling at its most boring: “YOU THOUGHT WAS GOOD PERSON???? WAS EVIL PERSON!!!! UR FOOLED!” Writers in a position of privilege are obsessed with this specific iteration of Shock. I think it is because they have rarely had to experience it. 

There is a particular kind of shock that comes with discovering that someone you care about holds a belief or set of beliefs that is dehumanizing to you personally, if not actually – LOL!! – inimical to your existence. Many if not most women have suffered and weathered this shock. Many people of color have. Many LGBT people have. Relevantly to this specific discussion, MANY Jewish people have. It is not Shocking to anyone in an unprivileged cultural position that someone you like, someone you care about, someone who is a “hero,” even someone you thought cared about YOU, can be revealed to have been metaphorically Working Against You All Along. Nobody thinks it’s fucking SURPRISING that you CAN’T TRUST ANYBODY to be on your side! Of course you can’t! You just adjust to that and try to get through your life in spite of it. No shit, white dudes. 

That twist is very boring. “Shock Value” is not even a good term for it, because it is very old news. I don’t know enough about the broader Cap ~mythos and creative origin to speak with authority about that, and others have already done it better anyway. But I do think that plenty of rich white dude creators could benefit from an examination of why they find it pleasurable to fish this kind of lazy nonsense out of their stupid diapers instead of actually writing a “story” with “human characters” like normal people

also I die of mirthless laughter every time one of these idiots yammers on about how they had to KEEP THE OLD STORY FRESH or REVITALIZE IT or GET SOME NEW ENERGY or TAKE IT IN A NEW DIRECTION and the ONLY WAY to do that was TURNS OUT HIM EVIL ALL ALONG! if you gave a room full of 13-year-old fanfiction writers 10 minutes and a random word generator they could come up with 100000 things to do with your character and exactly none of them would be “he was just like evil idk” so until I see an A/B/O Superman on newsstands you fartsticks can just cool your jets about how daring and creative you are

No

i’m weak.

im screaming!!

The Curious Case of May Parker

It’s happening in the cartoons, too:

Aunt May (and Ms. Lion) from Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends (1980s)

Aunt May from Spider-Man: The Animated Series (1990s)

Aunt May from The Spectacular Spider-Man (2000s)

Aunt May from Ultimate Spider-Man (2010s)

True facts: Every time Peter’s uncle Ben dies in the latest origin story May absorbs the life force left over from his remaining years and uses it to rejuvenate herself

Uncle Ben dies over and over again to keep her young

I’m gonna be contrarian about this and say it totally fits better than any casting or art for Aunt May I’ve ever seen.

Think about it: Peter’s supposed to be in high school or early college at most, and Uncle Ben is supposed to be Richard’s(Peter’s dad’s) older brother. Having Ben and May be in their 60s-70s was always ridiculous because it meant Peter was born super late in his parents’ lives; what, did Mary Parker have Peter in her 50s-60s? Richard and Mary die when he’s six, at a point in their own lives when they are physically capable(under certain continuities) of being SHIELD Field Agents. They’re supposed to meet on the job, fall in love, and have a kid in pretty short order, which fits well with mid-to-late 20s behavior, or early 30s on the outside. They die when he’s 6, so early-to-mid 30s, making Ben anywhere from 32-45 when he and May adopt Peter, depending on how much older you want him to be. Tack on 10 years for Peter to reach 16, and you end up with an age-range for May(assuming she was about Ben’s age, which she should since they were childhood friends) from 42-55 when Ben dies and Peter becomes Spiderman. Marisa Tomei is 51 and easily capable of playing 10 years younger when she needs to, allowing her to p much cover the whole age-range depending on how you want to play it. 

This was great casting; It makes the ages much more believable.