Comic Sales Down

Marvel has found itself in an online civil war after a top executive suggested too much diversity and female characters were to blame for declining comic sales.

The issue started when the company’s vice president of sales, David Gabriel, was asked by geek culture trade magazine ICv2 at the Marvel Retailer Summit why the company's numbers were down. His reply: "What we heard was that people didn’t want any more diversity. They didn’t want female characters out there. That’s what we heard, whether we believe that or not. I don’t know that that’s really true, but that’s what we saw in sales."

The mistake Marvel made, which is common among businesses, is that they looked at social media and saw a bunch of criticism about their product and decided to change the product to satisfy that criticism. The problem was that most of the criticism was not coming from their market, but from groups that would rarely, if ever, buy their product in the first place.

There's a reason why "Angela Queen of Hel" and "Mockingbird" got cancelled. There's a reason why "Iron Man" sales are down. There's a reason "Thor" sales are down. The market is responding to the changes.

If the changes were good or wanted by the market, Marvel would not be in this predicament. The sales would be the same or up. But the changes were bad and not wanted by the market. Thus, sales were down.

Bottom line is that Marvel (or any other company) cannot try to appease "social justice warriors" and continue to appeal to their market. They need to follow their market alone because no matter what, you will always have people who whine and complain about your product.