Those Pesky Women Characters are Destroying the Marvel Universe

Marvel’s David Gabriel came under fire last week when he talked about the declining sales of comic books.

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

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.

Realizing this was a bad comment that was going to result in thousands of comic book fans saying, “WE WANT DIVERSITY! IT’S JUST YOUR DIVERSITY SUCKS AND WE CAN’T FIND IT BECAUSE YOU KEEP PUSHING THOR ON US!”

Gabriel quickly clarified his comments. And by clarified, I mean backtracked on them.

“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.”

Just reading the names of those new characters, I can see why no one wanted to pay for those titles. Squirrel Girl? I can only assume that a girl was bitten by a radioactive squirrel and now has the power to scale trees quickly and store 50 pounds of whatever in her mouth. Moon Girl? I guess she only comes out at night and her powers are based on how much of the moon is showing or what kind of moon it is. Spider-Gwen, The Mighty Thor, and Ms. Marvel are just female versions of male characters. Real original. And I don’t know what a Miles Morales is, but a quick Google search tells me that he’s just a minority Spider-Man.

So, yeah. Maybe your diversity comic book sales suck because your characters are just female/minority versions of popular characters. Or they’re really bad ideas.

Here’s a free diversity character for you: Lung Blower. She’s a female who underwent a double lung transplant. The lungs she received gave her special powers that allows her to fill her lungs with a bunch of air without it bothering her. So she can blow houses down like the Big Bad Wolf or swim underwater with no issues or save lives with amazing CPR.

Pay me, Marvel. Or DC. I have no allegiances to either side. I just want money.