Marvel: What we heard was that people didn't want any more diversity

Grats, shitlords.

icv2.com/articles/news/view/37152/marvels-david-gabriel-2016-market-shift

>ICv2: You made the comment yesterday that in October, everything changed. Can you clarify what you meant by that?

>David Gabriel: There was just a big shift in the entire industry, and there were a lot of factors behind that. I think everybody had a modicum of blame publisher-wise. I think the economy had a little bit to blame. By economy, I'm talking about what was going on in the outside world which led to people not necessarily wanting to spend money in that October-November time frame.

>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.

>There was probably a little too much product going out at that time. We all got a good kick in the ass over that. What I had said was, 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. I hope that clears it up.

>ICv2: Part of it, but I think also it seemed like tastes changed, because stuff you had been doing in the past wasn't working the same way. Did you perceive that or are we misreading that?

>David Gabriel: No, I think so. I don't know if those customers with the tastes that had been around for three years really supporting nearly anything that we would try, anything that we would attempt, any of the new characters we brought up, either they weren't shopping in that time period, or maybe like you said their tastes have changed.

>There was definitely a sort of nose-turning at the things that we had been doing successfully for the past three years, no longer viable. We saw that, and that's what we had to react to. Yes, it's all of that.

Means less books.

>ICv2: Now the million-dollar question. Why did those tastes change?

>David Gabriel: 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.

>It was the old things coming back in that time period, three books in particular, Spider-Man Renew Your Vows, that had Spider-Man and Mary Jane married, that worked. The Venom book worked and the Thanos book worked. You can take what you want out of who might be enjoying those three books, but it is definitely a specific type of comic book reader, comic book collector that really liked those three series.

>ICv2: Do you think it could just be that you maybe hit a tipping point in terms of how much there was of a certain kind of book and that that's what was turning people off, as opposed to what they were?

>David Gabriel: That could be part of it, sure, definitely. We're open to anything and we're not turning away from any reasoning about that time period. But there was no indication that that was coming. There was no indication that the people who were buying those things didn't want more.

>This is a guess. I think we weren't the only publishers to see that. I've been hearing from smaller publishers, from indie publishers, that they also could not get their books out. They could not get their number ones launched. Everybody was having this. Maybe the tipping point was that there was just too much out there and people turned away. Could be.

>ICv2: What we heard people tell us coming out of ComicsPRO was that Marvel was pointing to DC as a reason for market problems. You've talked a little bit of that with regard to returns being in the pipe and that being an issue. I guess the question is do you think that's a fair characterization of what you were saying? Or do you think that is only focusing on one part of it?

>David Gabriel: I think they only focus on one part of it. When I presented, what I presented was just taking the market share that Diamond put out, not that we devise for ourselves, and showed where the biggest hits to market share for DC was in terms of when units and dollars left the market or left DC based on when their returns were coming in. I said that was one of the reasons for the industry being down dollar-wise.

>Another reason was that the industry lost Hastings chain, so nobody bothered to bring that up afterwards.

>I was adamant in saying I'm not blaming DC for anything. I'm pointing out what we saw in the Diamond charts and what we knew was coming and what we've heard from retailers and Diamond as well.

>Of course, people walked away. You and I have talked about this before. People who always want to bash us wanted to walk away and say that I blamed DC for that. We think it [returnability] was a bad practice. We think it's obvious where it hurt the industry.

>I haven't heard from anybody today saying what a great thing that it was for the industry. Maybe I didn't ask them that, but nobody came back and denied that there were cash flow problems as a result of that returnability. That's the only thing I can say that was a problem for the individual retailers economically.

Yeah less diversty.

Nigga I ain't reading all that

Yeah, it's totally because of diversity and economy, not because the writers are shit and their editors might as well not exist.

>Now I didn't say that DC being nice to retailers with returns is to blame for Marvel's current problems, but we've noticed through our analysis that DC being nice to retailers with returns is to blame for Marvel's current problems.
Never change, Marvel.

That's as may be, but D*sney will never let them drop the progressive agenda.

>Why did those tastes change?
They didn't. People just found out those new female/poc characters are defined only by being females/pocs.

This.

No one would give a crap about Jane Thor or the like IF the writing was good. The fandoms embrace of Kamala proves that.

tl;dr it's fucking white males' fault

Well now it certainly wasn't the constant fucking event spam that fucked over even one of the most popular comics with a new diverse legacy character and not allowing any of the new characters to breathe.

Certainly wasn't that.

Why does it always go to "People hate the brown folks" And not "we fucking sucked at picking out good writers."

Most people will give stuff a chance for a little while but if it sucks it sucks.

shame on you Sup Forums you fucking altright nazi fucks

maybe we can still get the movies to be more diverse

something something sjw ooga booga

Every time someone at Marvel says anything like this I picture it like that scene from Dr.Horrible where the guy keeps challenging to battle to prove he's his nemesis.

Fucking assholes. They know full well that they are peddling a bunch of shit books, then pull out the “oh no, people are racists” card. Fuck them, fuck their shit writers, fuck their shit artists, and most of all, fuck their shit editorial.

>we're getting more villain books and hero family books as a result

Fuck yes

It's really disturbing to see him imply that the reason for Marvel's troubles is because the readers won't give their "fresh, new, exciting ideas" a chance because they're racists and mysoginists. Seriously, is there a company that shits on its fans more than Marvel?

tl;dr:
>things that had been working for the 3 years prior (female-led books, diversity books, new characters, experimental books, relaunches, etc.) suddenly stopped working in their most recent relaunch (NOW 2.0) and they didn't see that coming
>the stuff that did work from NOW 2.0 were the things that pandered to the collector market (Venom, Thanos, Renew Your Vows)
>back-peddling the "this is DC's fault" comments
>now that they know how the market has changed, they can adjust to that (ie, pandering to collectors with classic characters, variants, and large issue #s instead of female characters, non-white characters, new characters, experimental books, relaunches, etc.)

Disney doesn't given a shit about publishing. They only care about the movies and Feige already reports to Iger.

>I was adamant in saying I'm not blaming DC for anything.
>immediately blames DC several times

>I haven't heard from anybody today saying what a great thing that it was for the industry. Maybe I didn't ask them that, but nobody came back and denied that there were cash flow problems as a result of that returnability. That's the only thing I can say that was a problem for the individual retailers economically.

Jesus fucking christ.

Literally every retailer I've seen comment on the issue has had nothing but overwhelmingly positive stuff to say about returnability. He's essentially saying that retailers are soooooooo stupid that they'd massively overorder on Rebirth and then have no spare cash to spend on Marvel stuff because they had to wait to be reimbursed. Does Marvel really think so little of retailers?

>What we heard was that people didn't want any more diversity
You heard right.

K

Actually proven to be wrong.

how?

I wonder if they'll ever realize the reason people didn't like these stories was because they were shit.

But that's the opposite of what he's saying. He's saying that the people who had been buying their new/diverse characters the 3 years prior suddenly stopped buying them while the collectors didn't, but they had put out too many new/diverse character-focused books and not enough collector-pandering books.

It's true. Most comic book fans are biased towards white males. Even colored fans in convention rather gonto white men booths in cons.


That's just how it is.


Events work. But I'm not sure about relaunches anymore.

Well when you keep rebooting to #1, flood the market with event shit instead of actual character development, it's hard for anyone to fucking care. Plus if you cleaned house with writers like Bendis or Slott, maybe your books wouldn't be shit. But no, it's the readers fault

>They didn't want female characters out there.
>our female characters

NO WE DIDN'T WANT THOR REPLACED WITH JANE FUCKING FOSTER

Disney has literally nothing to do with the "progressive agenda" at Marvel. That was purely them looking at the numbers and thinking that pushing a progressive agenda would result in higher sales. They were wrong.

"Diversity" is a false idol anyway. Maybe they should try telling good stories instead of slapping a minority label on everything.

Marvel needs to get rid of half of their books

I can't help but feel like they are learning the wrong lessons. Again.
>>things that had been working for the 3 years prior (female-led books, diversity books, new characters, experimental books, relaunches, etc.) suddenly stopped working in their most recent relaunch (NOW 2.0) and they didn't see that coming
Why is this exactly? Not meming
>>the stuff that did work from NOW 2.0 were the things that pandered to the collector market (Venom, Thanos, Renew Your Vows)
Is this really because collector market is stronger or is it because the main line is so shit the collector market looks strong by comparison?
>>back-peddling the "this is DC's fault" comments
Well you already burned that bridge didn't you Marvel
>>now that they know how the market has changed, they can adjust to that (ie, pandering to collectors with classic characters, variants, and large issue #s instead of female characters, non-white characters, new characters, experimental books, relaunches, etc.)
Again, is this really the right lesson here?

>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.

Correct me if I am wrong but arent Whor and black female Iron man actually selling?

The comic he is saying that failed probably are moon girl, squirrel girl, hellcat, mosaic, all new inhumans?

help me out

Bitch better not touch my moon girl. I just now got my subscription set up

Most non white male characters historically don't draw much fans.


I don't care for the writers name brand, considering the draw was the cape genre and the character appeal.

You got a better chance for deaf superman to sell than black superman.

Spencer on suicide watch.

Good books fail constantly. Quality has never been an indicator of sales nor has quality ever helped sales. A book being particularly bad can hurt sales, but a book being particularly good doesn't help sales. The best way to get a comic to succeed is to be comfortably mediocre while having as much name and brand recognition as possible which is why Rebirth worked so well.

fuck em

DC seems to be doing ok...

>Flintstones got the can
I'm still mad

>Does Marvel really think so little of retailers?
Yes. They would even literally force them to pay for books they never ordered to inflate sales. They give no shits about retailers.

>DC seems to be doing ok...

DC has and always will be more diverse than Marvel and they are doing great.

>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.
yfw they kill everything that isn't related to MCU

>You got a better chance for deaf superman to sell than black superman.
That's obvious.
>Have a story about supes but he's deaf now.
vs
>Have a story about donut steel that's almost exactly like superman. Only black.

How is DC more diverse than marvel?

They are straight up shitting on their customers

>On no the books arn't selling. Clearly it's because our customers are racist and not because of the shitty quality of our work.

They should just shut the whole thing down if this is their attitude.

it's totally how they did their diversity is why it failed. propping up a new oc as the very best perfect, better than the previous holder of name; or outright ignoring the previous holder; getting people that have never worked in comics ever to write a story that fails cause they can't write comics. having books completely contradict what is happening in other books.

also that nasty bait and switch marvel pulled with Quasar is kind of everything they do wrong in a ball.

>evanposting is dead, long live draxposting

>I dont read comics

Why are you here.

>Why is this exactly? Not meming
Because they flooded the market with them. It worked great when Marvel had like 5 books for the people that wanted that. It didn't work when they had 50 books for the people that wanted that. It went from "neat, I'm going to buy these 5 books" to "eh, this is way too much to follow, I'm out."

How are they so dense?

Could ONE editor not come on Sup Forums, read a BASIC explanation of why their character pandering is flawed, and THINK about the direction their writers are going?

Seriously. It seems like they all live in a bubble amongst themselves and the social media crowd for what works and what doesn't.

It blows my mind that they can't reflect among themselves. It's so basic. How do these people get in positions of power and influence being so single minded and dense?

Batwoman, Apollo Midnighter.

>we had a lot of fresh, new, exciting ideas that we were trying to get out
why is he lying, Sup Forums?

People liked X-Men just fine when Claremont and the editors were throwing every possible kind of new character, race, nationality and sexuality at it.

That would be impossible to do nowadays because you can't build a Big Two series so much on new characters and you certainly can't give it years to find its audience (I'm not being sarcastic, the market has changed and they can't do that).

What was annoying about the past few years was not the diversity but the way Marvel, in interviews and worst of all in the comics, congratulated themselves for being so advanced and progressive and political for doing stupid things with mostly old characters.

People in the entertainment business really do believe that they're better people than the rest of us, and we all know they're more ruthless and racist than the rest of us, so we get mad when they pat themselves on the back.

Their big crossover team film has a cape chick in it

I know as a head honcho you're not supposed to say they were publishing shit books, but can't he just say "our product was subpar?"

Have some goddamn respect for yourself, jesus christ.

There are also plenty of good books that only got recognition after they were cancelled, thanks to late trade releases or word of mouth finally getting around. By then it's too late.

Whereas it doesn't matter how bad Batman or Spider-Man get, they'll always have numbers that keep them out of cancellation. Not because they're good, but because they're known. There is a pretty significant percentage of the floppy buying market that pull the same families of books, regardless of quality, just because they've been pulling them for years, if not decades.

The problem is that they want this new characters to be loved and popular RIGHT FUCKING NOW and that's not how it works. Kamala was a step in the right direction, until they keep forcing her everywhere.

Instead of trying to meet quotas, they should've been more focus on writing better stories and characters.

and a black dude

In the current market, anyway. 60's-70's Marvel and the Mignoliaverse show that new chracters can succeed, but only when they come from trusted/good creators and a place of honesty.

Face it, Sup Forums. The Marvel you grew up with is dead and gone forever. This Disney company is a fake, an entellechia, a bad copy of the Marvel Universe you can find in classic reprints. Abandon all hope.

Chinese Superman,Aqualad,Black Kid Flash, Black Manta

Not that user, but while I'd argue about numbers, DC always felt more sincere in their attempts (as far as media goes, of course.)

>They didn't want female characters out there.
Nigga, don't you go homo.

>It's the fucking Power Rangers all over again

So let me get this right: not only did they expect characters that weren't popular and/or were newly made/newly diversified to sell, but they were also surprised that the things that people really liked and wanted (Spidey and MJ) were the things that were selling?

More female characters with substance besides oh look it's a girl, with their homosexual characters don't parade around their sexuality as a selling point, have had homosexual characters much longer than Marvel, have been doing legacy and diverse characters much longer than Marvel, evolve their legacy characters over years organically, etc etc.

You haven't been reading comics for many years I take it.

obviously they need to introduce their new ideas in the MCU first like Coulson or DC's retarded clown whore

Wonder Woman already in the 1940s
Tom Kalmaku in 1950

>because we had a lot of fresh, new, exciting ideas that we were trying to get out and nothing new really worked.
BECAUSE YOU KEEP MAKING COLLEGE AGE FEMALE STORIES WITH THE SAME LIBERAL MESSAGES!

Marvel has
>Riri
>Moon girl
>America Chavez
>Kamala
>Mosaic
>Sam Nova
>Cho Hulk
>Miles
>Sam cap
>Sunspot

Marvel has more minorities leading books than DC, the only aspect that DC wins is in having more LBGT characters in their comics

This is a great example of corporate speak. Never admitting anything you did was wrong and the blame always lies elsewhere. It was because of what DC did, the election, Trump, or reader's tastes changed. They will never admit that they were not producing good books or stories (especially events) and they swung too hard with diversity in changing so many of their well known heroes roles with either a woman or a minority character.

>Rebirth is mediocre
For free or for a fee Mousekeeper?

I notice that DC doesn't mind having multiple people be the same hero at a time.

Marvel thinks legacy, DC thinks '(x character)-family"

I've been reading Marvel for about 30 years.

I don't care about diversity. I want to read about the same characters I've read about for 30 years. Yes, I want new characters too. But not legacy characters taking over the characters I want to read about. That's good once in awhile, but not when they replace all the major ones with diversity hires.

I like Ms. Marvel. I've hated America so far. America goes too far in with the pandering and references, nobody enjoys that cringy shit.

Glad to see RYV being successful.

Every single book you named is a cash grab attempt in the last few years. DC evolves their female and gay characters organically and doesn't tout that around as a selling point.

Good job showing how casual you are and falling for marketing tactics.

>What we heard was that people didn't want any more diversity.
Fucking bullshit.

What people don't want if forced, pandering diversity that comes at the expense of all your original characters.

DC has fucking tonnes of diversity and alot of those books are Sup Forumss favorites (Midnighter, New Super-Man, Green Lanterns etc) BECAUSE they didn't kill off the original versions and force these one on people. The characters also don't spend all their time talking about how evil and privileged literally all straight white males are or pointing out that they're awesome because they're not straight white males.

>The Marvel Universe died in Secret Wars
HYPERCRISIS IS REAL

>Every single book you named is a cash grab attempt in the last few years.

And you think people care? they will rather focus on the character than the story.

The new atom in JLA, wonder woman, cyborg, john stewart

>because we had a lot of fresh, new, exciting ideas that we were trying to get out and nothing new really worked.
You just came up with a bunch of marketing stunts with absolutely no substance behind them. How about you make good comics instead. Like a fucking comics company.

That guy already tweeted you how Spencer.

Of those characters only Kamala, Cho Hulk, and Sam Nova are worth a damn. Even with then, Champions is ruining all three of them.

Really this.

People have this problem where they always hone in on some story element instead of realizing that the creative team are flat out shit. Like, if your artists look like something you find on Deviantart, it's the artist fault. If you have stories that go nowhere cause they always get interrupted by event, it doesn't matter what the protagonist is.

>you think people care?
The sales charts say "definitely no."

One the one hand, they're not learning exactly the right lessons. It's not all of diversity that's bad, it's about how much you do it and how you execute it.

On the other hand , if they can't do diversity right, I don't care, I'm fine with them not doing it at all.

And on the final hand, yes, the sjw outrage will be fun.

already lurking the neogaf thread on it

This is glorious news. Hopefully one fewer outlets indoctrinating people with their cucked regressive liberal agenda.

>implying 9/10ths of Rebirth isn't Jurgens-tier

I think there are cases where the groups are bloated as hell (batman and green lantern), but I like the concept overall and I wish they would apply it to villains, too.

Do you know how many people care more about "representation" in comic that having good stories?