Let’s not beat around the bush here: Marvel’s numbers for female and non-binary creators in their March 2018 solicits are just embarrassingly bad. I mean, only ten? Wow. It’s been a long, long time since we’ve seen a number this low from either DC or Marvel. While women and non-binary creators remain a small minority at both publishers, representation’s definitely grown over the past several years, as have the ranks of these creators. At this point, if one of the Big Two isn’t employing AT LEAST 20 female and non-binary creators to write and draw their books, then they’re not even trying. And to hit a number this low, they’d almost have to be trying not to. This showing is straight up terrible. Let’s take a look at who’s doing what at Marvel in March. It won’t take very long:

Ashley Witter: Star Wars: Doctor Aphra #18 (cover)

Bilquis Evely: Peter Parker: The Spectacular Spider-Man #301 (variant cover)

Emanuela Lupacchino: Doctor Strange: Damnation #2 (variant cover)

Erica Henderson: The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl #30 (interior art, cover)

G. Willow Wilson: Ms. Marvel #28 (writer)

Jody Houser: Amazing Spider-Man: Renew Your Vows #17 (writer), Star Wars: Thrawn #2 (writer)

Kelly Thompson: Hawkeye #16 (writer), Rogue & Gambit #3 (writer)

Mariko Tamaki: She-Hulk #163 (writer)

Natacha Bustos: Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur #29 (interior art, cover)

Rainbow Rowell: Runaways #7 (writer)

All together, there are 10 different women scheduled to work on 12 different books at Marvel this March, 10 fewer creators than in February and 6 fewer books. As best I can tell, there are no non-binary creators listed in this round of solicits. These are appalling numbers. Last March, Marvel had 37 different female creators. THIRTY-SEVEN. And now they’re down to 10. That’s nearly a quarter of what they had a year ago. This is a stunning decline.

The last time Marvel was this low was October 2015, when they had 9 female creators on 10 books. That was two and a half years ago, and since then their numbers shot up. Now, after several months of declines, they’ve essentially collapsed. And ironically, March has been a great month for Marvel in recent years. They used to celebrate Women’s History of Month with “Women of Marvel” variant covers and sometimes special issues, with tons of female creators in the mix. Now they’re celebrating Women’s History Month with their lowest number of female creators in ages. And, adding insult to injury, some of the books listed above aren’t long for the world, with Hawkeye and She-Hulk soon to be cancelled.

So, what is going on here? First off, Marvel’s already axed or benched several books that were mainstays for female creators, including America, Captain Marvel, Generation X , and Gwenpool. The publisher doesn’t appear overly invested in promoting books with female leads or creators. This slew of cancellations is not at all helping the publisher’s reputation either, which was already suffering after their higher ups suggested that diverse books and creators don’t sell on multiple occasions. If you add to this lack of support for female-led comics things like the Nazi Captain America foolishness of Secret Empire, the fact that the chairman of the company is a rabid Trump supporter, and a recent spate of relaunches geared toward appeasing old school fanboys above all else, it seems that we may have a situation in which the folks who run Marvel aren’t particularly keen to hire female and non-binary creators AND female and non-binary creators may not be terribly interested in working for the mess that is Marvel right now. It hardly seems a welcoming environment.

Whatever is going on, it remains utterly baffling that the bulk of Marvel’s editorial departments seem fine with largely ignoring the massive, impressive ranks of female and non-binary writers and artists working in comics right now in favour of employing the same dudes over and over again. These dudes are not the future of comics. These women and non-binary creators could very well be. An inability to recognize changes in the industry as a whole is why Marvel went bankrupt in the 1990s, and it seems to be why they’re faltering again here in the 2010s. Case in point: The eight bazillion variant covers they do every month. They haven’t even learned from their past, so it’s no wonder that they’ve got no real vision for the future.

EDIT: An earlier version of this post missed a variant cover by Bilquis Evely, and had Marvel’s numbers at 9 creators on 11 books. It’s actually 10 on 12, which while better is still absolutely terrible.