Marvel’s vice president of sales has blamed declining comic-book sales on the studio’s efforts to increase diversity and female characters, saying that readers “were turning their noses up” at diversity and “didn’t want female characters out there”.Trust the marketplace to tell you what people really like. It's another example, if one was needed, of "I say it's spinach and I say the hell with it."
Speaking at the Marvel retailer summit about the studio’s falling comic sales since October, David Gabriel told ICv2 that retailers had told him that fans were sticking to old favourites. “What we heard was that people didn’t want any more diversity,” he said. “They didn’t want female characters out there. That’s what we heard, whether we believe that or not.”
He added: “I don’t know that that’s really true, but that’s what we saw in sales … 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.”
N.B., "ICv2 is an online trade magazine that covers geek culture for retailers", according to Wikipedia. Whether what geeks have is a culture is perhaps a matter of opinion. I might characterize it as the efflorescence of a constellation of shared neuroses.
