Marvel VP Admits Diversity Hurt Sales

In early April, genre culture outlet ICv2 published an interview with David Gabriel, in which the vice president of sales of Marvel Comics blamed an October-November sales slump on "changing tastes." In his opinion, those changing tastes came from readers who were tired of "more diversity" and "female characters."

"What we heard was that people didn't want any more diversity," Gabriel told ICv2.

"They didn't want female characters out there. That's what we heard, whether we believe that or not ... 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. That was difficult for us because we had a lot of fresh, new, exciting ideas that we were trying to get out and nothing new really worked."

Gabriel also indicated that the October-November sales slump had caused Marvel to rethink aspects of its publishing strategy, saying "After looking at everything that was going on, we knew that we had to make some changes and we couldn't do anything the next month. We had to wait six months before things could start taking place. That's sort of what we're getting to now."