While the Marvel-Disney monster has been ruling the box office, Marvel Comics sales have been having serious issues. One obvious factor was trying to force political correctness on readers by replacing Peter Parker, Iron Man, etc with ridiculously politically correct "diverse" versions.
In a revelation that would surprise no one, comic book readers were not interested in a Muslim Ms. Marvel, a Latino Spider-Man who isn't Peter Parker or the Angela Davis version of Iron Man. And Marvel's VP of Sales made the mistake of admitting that.
I do know that, with all the returns that were coming to Diamond, there was a lot of unease in the market. There was money that was missing from the market because of those returns. There was a lot of work that retailers were doing to get all of those returns back.
Because of that, there was anger. There was anger because of economic reasons. There was anger because of story reasons for all of us...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.
After David Gabriel's comments, the expected crybully brigades on Twitter, Tumblr and then Slate, Vox and all the expected outlets began to howl. And David Gabriel was sent out to make the exact opposite comments.
"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.
"We have also been hearing from stores that welcome and champion our new characters and titles and want more! 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."]
I'm proud and excited to be forced to say the opposite to you of the things I just said.
The Marvel-Disney Kremlin will be sticking with Muslim Marvel and Biracial Spider-Man and Angela Davis Iron Woman and Korean Hulk and Transgender Punisher. But they'll also be pairing the garbage PC characters everyone hates with the characters readers actually buy and enjoy. Want to read them? You'll have to eat your politically correct spinach. Pairing unpopular characters to make them popular has never worked before. But when leftists take over a company, they put PC ahead of profits.