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Diversity in comic book characters is 'harming sales', says Marvel boss

Despite making significant leaps in recent years, diversity in comic book
characters appears to be harming sales.

David Gabriel, the vice president of sales at Marvel, says that changing narratives and introducing new female, non-white and gay characters may not be sitting well with its core audience.

“What we heard was that people didn’t want any more diversity,” he told ICv2.

“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.

“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.”

(Credit: Marvel Comics)
(Credit: Marvel Comics)

Over the past few years, there’s been the introduction of Miles Morales, a mixed-race iteration of Spider-Man, black teenage genius Riri Williams taking over the Iron Man mantle from Tony Stark in ‘Invincible Iron Man’, Iceman coming out as gay, and a female version of Thor.

And indeed, Marvel reported historically low sales in February this year, with readership for its usually leading titles like the ‘Star Wars’ and ‘Spider-Man’ down by as much as 74,000 copies.

Though whether that’s anything to do with diversity is not known. Some comic book fans put it down to something rather more fundamental.

After the initial interview, Gabriel sought to ‘clarify’ some of his comments.

“We have also been hearing from stores that welcome and champion our new characters and titles and want more,” he went on.

“They’ve invigorated their own customer base and helped them grow their stores because of it. So we’re getting both sides of the story and the only upcoming change we’re making is to ensure we don’t lose focus of our core heroes.

“Let me be clear, our new heroes are not going anywhere.

“We are proud and excited to keep introducing unique characters that reflect new voices and new experiences into the Marvel universe.”

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