The comic giant’s new position acting as Disney’s R&D department means it needs to take risks in order to survive. The diversity debate isn’t the issue – it’s a lack of understanding how the industry has changed over the last decade

Last week, David Gabriel, Marvel’s vice-president of sales, told the comics industry trade reporter Milton Griepp that he had heard complaining from retailers about the company’s strategy of publishing books starring women and people of color in high-profile roles such as Iron Man, Captain America and Thor. The grousing, he said, correlated with a drop in sales.

Marvel superheroes aren’t just for white men – true diversity could boost sales | JA Micheline Read more

The internet subsequently lined up to tee off on Gabriel, and perhaps understandably: the war between comics fans over whether to preserve in amber the cultural mores of a couple of kinda-progressive guys writing in the 1960s doesn’t feel like it has a lot of ambiguity in it. What’s been lost in the conversation is that Gabriel wasn’t talking about sales to bookstores, or, of course, box-office grosses, where diversity obviously sells – he was talking about the direct market: comic book stores.

I love going to comic stores and hearing people argue face-to-face about plot twists, retcons and character choices. Gabriel is not the only one who has heard moaning about Marvel’s penchant for dropping characters of different races or genders into costumes usually filled by white men. I’ve heard it, too: why is Thor a woman now? Why is the Falcon, a black superhero named Sam Wilson, doing double duty as Captain America? When do we get the old Hulk back?

But anybody complaining that a favorite character suddenly has a new race or gender must have started reading comics yesterday, because for as long as there have been comic books and black people, white superheroes from Spider-Man to Green Lantern have existed as women or people of color in alternative timelines, as the result of a magic spell, or in the far future.

These are the least weird permutations the characters go through: Thor was a frog briefly. But if you want to go someplace where people will be as upset about them as they’ve ever been about anything, a comic book store is a good bet.

It shouldn’t surprise people that the entrenched superhero readership is resistant to change – but it should push the conversation toward parts of the market where there is growth. As the comics writer G Willow Wilson points out, diverse characters outside Marvel’s “core” of elderly, franchise-friendly creations are doing quite well, especially outside the direct market. Look at Wilson’s own Ms Marvel, Ryan North and Erica Henderson’s Unbeatable Squirrel Girl, and Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Black Panther, which remains a top 20 bestseller in actual bookstores, according to Nielsen data.

These books, along with Mark Waid and Chris Samnee’s Black Widow and Mike Allred and Dan Slott’s Silver Surfer, are actually conducting the difficult work of artistic invention. Marvel Comics is at this point essentially Disney’s R&D division, financially the tip of a very large iceberg of multibillion-dollar entertainment properties. In pure industrial terms, it’s Marvel’s job to keep pounding out superhero stories that try to keep pace with changes in the state of the art. If it isn’t failing repeatedly, it probably isn’t taking enough risks.

In fact, why give legacy comics fans what they think they want at all? The notion that the longtime readers somehow have a greater claim on a comics character than the new fan – and that both outrank the artist – has plagued the industry for as long as there have been superheroes; people who spend 20 or 30 years reading the adventure of a single character develop proprietary feelings that have nothing to do with the nature or intricacy of the creative process. Comics fandom has huge problems of sexism, entitlement and plain old cruelty, and it often pours out its vast reserves of ambient rage on the artists themselves.

Even in cases when an artist has done something provocative or dumb, the response can be disproportionate – Twitter users told J Scott Campbell, famous for his pin-up art, to kill himself during the backlash to a cover he’d drawn of a teenage girl. Of course, that’s not a patch on what happens to women: Chelsea Cain, who didn’t do anything other than exist as a woman and a writer of comics, had to delete her Twitter account after fans sent her everything up to and including obscene “fan art” of the character she’d been writing. “My day job is writing thrillers,” Cain wrote shortly before leaving the platform. “Bestsellers. Sold millions of copies. Never had to block people until I started writing comics.”

Twinned to that problem is a corporate history built on marginalizing women and people of color and swindling artists out of their livelihoods and the rights to their work. Marvel and DC, now unique in the comics publishing world, hire not artists and writers but stewards, people who may do the work of their careers writing and drawing for flat fees and perhaps a small consideration at the company’s discretion when their work is used in a movie, if the artists themselves remain popular. When a movie opens, it’ll be Marvel’s The Avengers, as though the company logo and not Jack Kirby had drawn the book.

It’s important that women and people of color remain represented throughout the comics publishing world, especially in influential positions like writer and editor. But perhaps it’s more important to allow the intellectual property-farm model for the superhero industry, which marginalized those people in the first place, to pass into memory. Then a different model, which considers the rights of real people before the dollar values on fictional ones, can ascend.

And if you examine the sales figures outside the cloistered little multiverse of superhero comics, you can already see it rising.