Marvel Exec Blames Diversity for Declining Sales, Quickly Backtracks

Marvel's VP of Sales, David Gabriel, attributed a decline in readership to increased diversity. Then he quickly clarified what he meant.

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Contrary to how popular their movies are, Marvel comic sales are way down. This is the type of thing you think would worry all of their employees, but especially their VP of Sales. That VP of Sales, a guy named David Gabriel, was recently asked about the shift, which he cited as occurring last October. Gabriel blamed a number of factors, including the economy, and an oversaturation of the market, but his answer when it came to more diverse heroes is the one that generated the badpub this past weekend because that's how the world works.

Said Gabriel about the increase in representation, and the potential correlation with lower sales:

I don't know if that's a question for me.  I think that's a better question for retailers who are seeing all publishers.  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.
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.

After that answer didn't go over well, at all, really, Gabriel provided clarification where he said Ms. Marvel, Moon Girl, and Spider-Gwen (among others) were popular characters who wouldn't be going away anytime soon:

Discussed candidly by some of the retailers at the summit, we heard that some were not happy with the false abandonment of the core Marvel heroes and, contrary to what some said about characters “not working,” the sticking factor and popularity for a majority of these new titles and characters like Squirrel Girl, Ms. Marvel, The Mighty Thor, Spider-Gwen, Miles Morales, and Moon Girl, continue to prove that our fans and retailers ARE excited about these new heroes. And 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 and pair them with our iconic heroes.

As far as I can tell it remains unclear what has caused a decrease in sales (constant reboots, more competitors, etc.). But, if you can figure it out, Marvel probably has a job for you.

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