The Wicked + The Divine Readers Poll 2016

Hullo.



As there’s so few large polls done by comic readers, I suspect this may be passed around a little further than the standard The Wicked + The Divine editorial piece, so I’m providing a little context. The Wicked + the Divine is Jamie McKelvie, Matt Wilson and my own Image comic. We found ourselves wondering exactly who was reading the book, or at least who our core readership was. We provided a link to a google survey in issue 19 and asked our readers a bunch of questions, some serious, some less so. The response was pretty impressive – 1500 or so readers responded. The survey is pretty hefty, and includes demographics, comic purchasing habits (including piracy), WicDiv related trivia and a lot of fucking around. I did a write up of the core results in the back of issue 21, which came out last week, and promised a wider look at the data to follow.



You’re reading it.

EDIT: Just put in some larger res images of certain graphs, as Tumblr ate them alive. Oh, Tumblr.

A few caveats before we dive in.

Firstly, this is very much a core readership survey, of people who follow the book close enough to actually read the back matter and see a tiny link in there. As it was just a link, it was passed around online by itself, but there’s no real sign of anyone trying to skew the results in a noticeable way. Still – things like 70.2% of those who responded having read Phonogram (our other indie book) implies this really is core. We’ve seen the sales figures. 70.2% of WicDiv readers don’t read Phonogram.



(Including trades, I suspect a maximum of 20% of WicDiv readers have read any Phonogram. But that’s a different article.)



Second caveat – I’m doing the math on this, and am far from an expert in spreadsheets or analysis. I’ve tried my best to make it work. The data seems pretty solid. However, you’ll see about half the graphs below are much better than the other half of the graphs. The better half are the ones which our skilled designer Sergio did for the magazine. The others are the ones I’ve just generated. You can tell as mine often have terrible artifacts on from where I’ve screenshotted badly. SIGH.



I would also say to fellow creators that googles forms are pretty robust. This is an easy way to do a survey of your readership. It’s probably worth giving this a shot, though probably in a less silly way that we did it. I do ramble.



Anyway – here comes the graphs, both hot and sexy and ones that are less hot and sexy. Go go data, etc.



DEMOGRAPHICS

The big stuff, obviously.

Suffice to say considerable parts of WicDiv’s core readership isn’t really what people would consider a typical comic readership.

The next bunch were trickier, and a weakness of our poll’s methodology. To try and keep things simple, we wanted to do as many drop down options as possible. While obviously it limits people’s choices, it does mean that the data can be used without processing. However, when we reached nationality and ethnicity, that was impossible.



We did a “What continent do you live on?” one, which is simple.



After that, it’s just hard. Here’s nationality…

As you can see, there’s a lot going on there. The biggest proportion is American with 50.5%, followed by British with 18.3% and Canadian with 6.3%. I merged all of the United Kingdom entries into British, so includes those who identified as Scottish, English, Welsh and Northern Irish. American includes people who helpfully self-identified as Californian and Texen. Other groups who had more than a percent include Australian (3.5%), Brazilian (2.2%), German (1.5%), Spanish (1.4%), Dutch (1%) and Filipino (1%).

With ethnicity I’ve wrestled with the data and realised it’s too complicated to actually get anything out of. While we asked for ethnicity, the data we got back was a mixture of race, ethnicity and nationality, all of which can overlap. To create groups of any size I had to march uncomfortably over people’s self-identification to group people together, and when I looked at the data I got from that, I just wasn’t happy with it in any way. The process wasn’t helped by this category having an enormous amount of people who entered jokes about being white rather than just saying they were white. Working out ways to filter them out without actually deleting actual responses was a not inconsiderable amount of work. We probably should have had a “Please, this is not a field to mess around in” guideline on the poll.



As such, any numbers I’m giving should be taken with a huge pinch of salt. The only one I’m relatively okay with saying is about 75% of our readers could be positioned under the umbrella of “white” with any other ethnicity, including mixed, making up about 25%.



Religion and Education was drop-down menus, so easier…

So there you go. WicDiv’s readership. I love them. I love them all.

COMIC PURCHASING



I suspect this is the bit which most interests my peers.

I have no idea how this compares to other readerships, but would be interesting to find out. Worth noting here that “Nothing” can mean many other things other than piracy (e.g. Borrowing, Libraries, etc.)

That said…

So less than 50% of the readership admit to pirating. However, the bit which interests me is this…

…which is an interesting amount of crossover. You can unpack these numbers all sorts of ways. Worth noting that this question was only answered by 648 people. From a survey of 1500, that’s a noticeable drop-off. From a creator’s perspective, only having 15 people who admit to never actually buying anything does seem to make me smile.

Then there’s the aspects relevant to just us…

Obviously this is skewed as the poll was in the single issue, so leaning towards the single issue buyers (though as it was posted on the WicDiv tags, some trade-waiters would get it too). The I Don’t Buy WicDiv would include some pirates, some random folk who just filled in the form, some people who borrow friends’ copies and some Library folk.

Anecdotally from retailers, we were told that basically a third of people bought both covers. That this is well below that makes us happy. Obviously we love selling books, but we’d rather have more actual readers, and this seems to imply that at least in our core readers, there’s limited amount of going for alts.

(In passing - that nearly 20% of the readership have already bought the deluxe hardback does show how hardcore this poll response must be.)

WicDiv isn’t our only comic though…

We were interested in which of our other works the readers were aware of. Unsurprisingly the core Gillen/McKelvie/Wilson Young Avenger/Phonogram runs get the most attention.

Oh - and as we have Merch, we wondered who bought what.

Of course, this is before we launched our Threadless shop. I suspect things would be different now.

(The first four answers are T-shirts, all are actually in teh Threadless shop. We did a print of 18′s cover for ECCC. The Stickers were done… earlier, I forget where. And our friends at Espionage are doing our cosmetic range. No, really. What a wonderful world this is.)

We got a bunch of feedback here in terms of other merch to try, and we’re certainly processing it. Thanks for it.

WICDIV FAN QUESTIONS



For random passersbys, this is where things start getting really WicDiv centric, so possibly a good time to bail. There’s not spoilers as such, but in terms of questions like “Which character do you hate the most?” may give you clues about who may have acted like a total shit at some point in our story.

(Spoilers: it’s all of them. .)

FAVOURITE ARC



Fandemonium – 39%

The Faust Act – 27.3%

Commercial Suicide – 20%

Rising Action – 13.7%

I suspect I’d go along with this, though it’s not really fair on Rising Action, as it wasn’t completed. However it’s interesting to compare and contrast with this…

FAVOURITE ISSUE



13 – 20.2%

18 – 15.7%

11 – 13.1%

1 – 8.1%

8 – 6.2%

5 – 6%

14 – 5.3%

16 – 3.9%

6 – 3.5%

12 – 2.6%

17 – 2.3%

19 – 2.3%

15 – 2.1%

2 – 1.9%

3 – 1.8%

7 – 1.5%

10 – 1.3%

9 – 1.2%

4 – 0.8%

As at a glance I think Commercial Suicide is punching higher on the “favourite issues” front that its standing would suggest and Fandemonium a little lower. This also doesn’t surprise me. A concentration of good issue doesn’t mean the whole trade hangs together.

Issue 4 being at the bottom is a little bit of a surprise, but thinking about it, it does make sense. I suspect most of its best stuff is actually sucked into issue 5 in people’s memories.

On a personal level. I’m pleased that issue 8 is so high up people’s favourites as well.

And now we go totally Smash Hits.

FAVOURITE GOD!

Lucifer – 19.9%

Persephone – 18.2%

Inanna – 14.2%

The Morrigan - 13.9%

Tara – 5.5%

Baphomet – 4.6%

No Preference – 4.5%

Dionysus – 4.4%

Norns – 3.3%

Amaterasu – 3.1%

Minerva – 2.7%

Baal – 2.6%

Sakhmet – 1.5%

Woden – 1.3%

Ananke – 0.1%

I may be taking Kill Your Darlings a little too literally.

LEAST FAVOURITE GOD!



Woden – 36.6%

Ananke – 27.1%

No Preference – 9.5%

Sakhmet – 6.6%

The Norns – 4.9%

Amaterasu – 3.3%

Baphomet – 3.8%

Baal – 2.3%

Minerva - 2%

Dionysus – 1.1%

The Morrigan – 0.8%

Tara – 0.7%

Lucifer – 0.5%

Inanna – 0.4%

Persephone – 0.3%

Top two totally aren’t a surprise. Which is why I also did…

LEAST FAVOURITE GOD APART FROM WODEN AND ANANKE!



No Preference – 22.8%

Sakhmet – 19.4%

Baphomet – 13.6%

The Norns – 13.6%

Amaterasu – 9.9%

Baal – 7.9%

Dionysus – 3.4%

Inanna – 1.3%

Minerva – 3.5%

Tara – 1.9%

Morrigan - 1.7%

Lucifer – 0.7%

Persephone – 0.3%

In retrospect, I wish we hadn’t included a “No preference” option.

WHICH GOD DO YOU WANT TO “DO”?



Lucifer – 17.6%

Persephone – 12.3%

No Preference – 10.6%

Amaterasu – 9.8%

Baphomet – 9.6%

Baal – 9.5%

Inanna – 8.3%

Morrigan – 7.9%

Sakhmet – 6.9%

Tara – 3.7%

Dionysus – 2.8%

Norns - 1%

And finally…

Good work.

WICDIV FANDOM ACTIVITY

We’re fascinated in this kind of thing. Obviously we see a lot of people chat WicDiv, especially in the core readership, but we wondered how widespread that was and what forms that fan activity took…

WHAT DO WICDIV READERS LIKE?

How to get into comics was far too complicated to show results of, but it’s all really interesting to scans. Things akin to “Friends” seem most popular.



However, it was also fun to make everyone’s mind go SPANDANG! By asking favourite stuff. This obviously let to a lot of answers – most things got one or two votes at most – and as it was a write-in thing, many people entered multiple choices. Clearly, I stomped over all that doing huge search and replaces which basically turned the whole cell into one of the choices. What was my method? Whimsicality. Well, mostly. My whimsicality can be pretty brutal.

Worth stressing – all these are total count. When you’ve got 1500 people in the poll, most of these are showing anything that got more than ten votes in total.



FAVE COMIC



Here is an exception. I turned all multiple votes into anything OTHER than WicDiv, as that seems the polite thing to do. We still did worryingly well. Here’s the high scorers…

I mashed all votes in a set series together. I also, as trying to separate them out was far too tricky, mashed together all votes for Young Avengers together, whether it was V1 or our own V2. Other things which got more than 5 votes included Loki: Agent of Asgard, Nextwave, Ultimate Spider-man, Angela: Queen of Hel, Daytripper, From Hell, Planetary, Hellblazer, Rat Queens, Morning Glories and Strangers in Paradise.



FAVOURITE BAND



I suspect Florence gained a boost from being one of the first people I searched/replaced for, but still pretty impressive. I should have said “Musical artist” rather than band, but people seemed to choose whatever they felt like anyway.

Apart from the above, all the following got 5 or more votes: Arctic Monkey, Pixies Prince, Marina and the Diamonds, Garbage, The Clash, Paramore, Daft Punk, Gorillaz, Muse, Nightwish, Sleater-Kinney, Arcade Fire, Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, Queens of the Stone Age, Tegan & Sara, The Decemberists, The National, Weezer, Belle and Sebastian, Imagine Dragons, Iron Maiden, Blink 182, Bloc Party, Depeche Mode, Manic Street Preachers, Metric, Rush, Pulp, The Killers, St. Vincent and They Might Be Giants. Of course.

FAVOURITE SONG

Basically nothing got more than 2 votes. One of the 2 votes was 2112, which I hoped was a typo, but I suspect shows there’s Rush fans in the house. All are welcome here.



(This whole section having people include comments about being afraid of being judged by yours truly made me smile. I’m not that mean. All love of pop music is good love of pop music. It especially made it smile when people were apologising for liking stuff I love.)



FAVOURITE MOVIE



Here I just gave up and lumped some series together, except Empire Strikes Back which I did by itself. Why? Don’t ask me. It seemed like a good idea at the time.

Below the 10+ club in the graphs, the following got between 9 and 5 votes: Ghostbusters, Aliens, Princess Mononoke, The Big Lebowski, Fight Club, Howl’s Moving Castle, Only Lovers Left Alive, Spirited Away, The Godfather, Back to the Future, Brick, Goodfellas, Guardians of the galaxy, Heathers, Stardust, The Prestige, Amelie, Brazil, Casablanca, Donnie Darko, Moulin Rouge, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Her, Hot Fuzz, Mean Girls, Memento, Royal Tenenbaums, The Crow, The Rocky Horror Picture Show and Trainspotting.

Slight further down the list with 4 was What We Do In The Dark, which makes me want to suggest a WicDiv double-bill with that and Only Lovers Left Alive. That pretty much captures the Duality of Morri and Baph.

FAVOURITE BOOK





Another one with a mass of options in. I decided to be generous to the big series and lump them all together – the exception being Pratchett’s Discworld books, which I kept separate. They just feel like their own things more than any of the other series, which is a thing I love about them, except it doesn’t exactly serve them well in something like this. Nothing but love to you, Terry.

Getting between 10 and 5 votes were: Ender’s Game, His Dark Materials, Pride and Prejudice, The Road, Catch-22, Cloud Atlas, House of Leaves, Night Watch (Told you!), The Hobbit, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Great Gatsby, The Stand, Cat’s Cradle, Small Gods (and again!), The Dark Tower and The Little Prince.

THE BIT WHERE KIERON WENT A BIT WEIRD IN THE MIDDLE OF THE POLL



My mind tends to wander. Forgive me.

Thanks, guys.

THE HEALTH AND FITNESS BIT

Where we go all health goth.

After a moment of kindness, I am now feeling personally victimised by my readership.

What’s the truth? Clayton and Jamie claim they can beat the singular pull up score above. Dee’s dad-body has stolen the ability from him. Hannah is laughing at us all. Sergio is being quiet. Heather Antos, Marvel Editor, who somehow got CC:ed into the mail, claims five. Matt and I can do more than ten. Chrissy tells us to get back to work.

So we shall.

Thanks for reading and much love to everyone who took time to fill in the form. We salute you.