You could blame the poll but it's because of the terrible business decisions made by Marvel, DC etc. They didn't have to change the way they did things but they wanted to and the poll was their excuse.
If it hadn't been that particular poll, it would have been some other cockamamie 'study'. They were simply looking for an excuse to implement an agenda, which wasn't just about women, either - it was the entire intersectional array of 'marginalized identities'.
even if it was true, they could have at least made quality comics that pandered to women, like how they do in japan. Sailor moon, cardcaptor sakura, chobits, etc. We didn't get anything like that because what they actually wanted was to pander to themselves.
Its the same way the "polls" that say more gamers are women but that counts candy crush and phone games etc that 60 year old women play. Just like comics the females that were actual fans of games liked them the way they were before all the pandering and self insert nonsense.
I know a few women who like the marvel movies, more so, in fact than I do. But, unlike me, I don't think that any of them have ever bought a marvel comic book in their lives.
@ensabahnur7657 no they don't. Nobody likes the "M-She-U." It's not gaining new female audiences because they were mever inclined to like this brand in the first place, and it's driving away the women who were already fans because they already liked it for the same reasons the men did.
It was confirmation bias, they used that one data point to use as a basis for their new business model and assumed their fan base would go along with it.
Its the same trick they used to claim that 49% of gamers are female, but what they ignored to mention when you actually look at the data reports had to add mobile in there. While the industry likes to pretend that '"traditional gaming" & mobile gaming are one and the same simply isnt true. 70% of that 49 claimed female demographic exclusive plays mobile games like Candy Crush, Patience, Animal Farm, various fashion games and doesnt show any interest what so ever in traditional gaming. I agree witth Dok that it is malice, there is decades of prove what demographic likes and where they are, but they like to play make believe
I've known women all my life whi were into traditional gaming, but those were always the tomboyish tyoes who were already inclined toward more boyish interests in general, and even then, they were far more often than not fans of games they could play with other people. Some of them like the single player stuff, but only if it's shorter experiences with a clearly defined story and not the kind of giant open ended games that you can basically live in for months like it was a part time job.
A similar study was conducted in relation to video games, where it concluded that around 50% of all users were women. The thing they left out was the fact that the data they used to arrive at that number included everyone who casually played games on their phones. This has resulted in a lot of nonsense happening in the AAA space, which has slowly been killing the industry in the Western part of the world. It would not be surprising if this were a coordinated act to destroy male-centric hobbies.
He didn't really cover the ideological side of it at that point because its effects hadn't really become fully apparent at the time in 2017, but one of Colin Moriarty's last videos with Kinda Funny in his Colin Was Right series is still one the definitive condemnations of the corrosive influence of mobile on the rest of gaming. The video was appropriately titled, "How Mobile Gaming Ruined Everything - Colin Was Right." He released it not long before he got the boot from his company because the cancel pigs tried to lynch him on Twitter over a dad joke on international women's day. He still does good work in general, but this is still one of his crowning achievements.
Marvel needs a complete company wide reboot, with everything these hacktivists done, made non-canon, and most importantly, all the hacktivists removed immediately.
Wkth the exception of a few isolated books here or there, the Marvel Universe as a whole wrapped up with Secret Wars in 2015 as far as I'm concerned. You could see the early stages of infiltration before that, but it spuraled out of control with All-New, All-Diffeeent. As far as the DCU goes, Doomsday Clock was the bookend for me.
SIXTY plus years of SALES were thrown out the window because of ONE poll on FACEBOOK of all things.....and current day is where that lled us. Comics dead, movies dead, games getting infected too.....SALES at an ALL TIME LOW across all entertainment; and still they go on like it's a good decision. We live in a clownsworld.
There's a fundamental miscalculation here on the part of Marvel and DC, they think that because women like slice of life and romance Manga/Novels that they can just shoehorn it into already existing superhero comics and expect women to flock to them, they can't and they won't. Why would any woman read a superhero slice of life comic when they could just read a slice of life Manga without the baggage, without the superhero tropes and without the nonsense?
@@Barbel1th Are you for real!? Did that actually happen!!!??? I've barely been scraping by with comics at all due to the poor writing, so I probably missed this if it did.
@@djktsjytej Yes, this happened. I can't remember the series, but I watch a comic review stream where they went over the issue. It is now my go-to gag for how ridiculous the comics industry has become with this DEI garbage.
Hey Wes, could you talk (since you're talking about women) how Marvel and DC have destroyed their female characters since the arrival of 2010 onwards, but above all, DC with Wonder Woman, Catwoman that she created are the most affected since the new 52, because it would be great an analysis of how these iconic characters are screwed by bad writing due to boss decisions
There's nothing wrong with trying to attract women to comics. But you don't alienate the current customer base to do so. They could have added some comics that appeal to women but not change the main line of comics.
It's not going to happen. Most women don't like superhero comics at all. I don't buy those stats at all. Whoever posted the data made it up or they are including non-superhero comics. You can go to any comic book store and count the female to male customer numbers. I think if asked there are many women who might say they like superhero comic book movies, but they are casual fans. A small group who controlled the companies ruined comics for everyone based on flawed information. It was an audience that never existed. Thank you Wes and Dok! I miss spinner racks. lol OMG. I've got the next DC push. Bat Barbie. It'll be the new 54.
Ask random females to tell u about the terminator and they won't know anything other then a robot and Arnold. Ask a random male and he would be able to tell you almost everything about terminator. Men and women are different no matter how hard they try they can't change biology
There's a HUGE difference between a COMIC FAN who buys actual COMICS week-in and week-out, and someone who only likes COMIC ICONOGRAPHY who might only have a comic character T-SHIRT and goes to the MOVIES.
Science fiction ran into this problem decades ago and conventions started to reflect it, when the genre moved more from literature to media with the sudden popularity of a particular film. A fan of television and movie sf is a completely different fan than a fan who read science fiction, and the movies were always several years behind what was going on in the literature. By the 90’s I’d pretty much stopped going to sf conventions because they’d become media cons and the writers were relegated to afterthoughts, and the comic book conventions followed suit. When Hollywood used the comic book fandom to launch successful comic book films by actually adapting the stories as they appeared in the books, they took away the wrong lesson from the popularity of those films and believed all those numbers reflected potential comic book readers which they didn’t.
I predict Marvel and DC Comics will go the way of Atari. Anyone else remember the American video game pioneer that overinvested in making products its customers did NOT want, driving itself bankrupt and killing the American video game industry in the early 1980s, before Nintendo revived this industry by making Americans buy imported products? We're buying manga and manhwa (Korean comics) because American comic book companies keep repeating Atari's mistake.
I agree. I have been saying that either Marvel or DC will, at the very least, fold shop on producing monthly comics within a year. They may option characters out, but they have mismanaged these companies for so long that eventually they'll just sell out and close shop. They know nothing about their clients, and worst of all, they couldn't care less. And THAT is a terrible way to do business.
@@BrianRidgway-u5g ellos solo le importa las licencias para hacer: películas, videojuegos, y juguetes y mucho más ahora va hacer terrible para estos "escritores" que un verdadero señor de negocios vea el desastre que son estás empresas en la parte editorial y se dará cuenta que no vale la pena por salvarla ya que si toda la industria está mal
Even if the data was legit, that does not mean female fans of comics would buy more comics if they were changed to pander to women in general. It is like assuming that men who like Barbie would buy more Barbie if they bumped up her breast size and made her work the pole. That may attract the attention of a few guys outside the fandom but chances are it would alienate the existing fanbase.
The infuriating part is that their idea of 'making comics for women' was simply to "put a chick in it and make it lame." Publishers didn't release books that looked like Outlander, or A Court of Rose and Thrones, or an anthology adapting various Mary Higgins Clark stories in hopes of appealing to what women actually like...No, they just took stories/characters intended for guys, and ruined them.
You can totally tell that it was deliberately designed to be a feminist conspiracy against male-dominated hobbies like video games, comic books and anime. If they were honest about it, and not being so disingenuous, even if the statistics and the data showed that there was a definite increase in female readers of comic books, why was there such a concentrated effort on downplaying the male super-hero characters and replacing them with race swapped, gender swapped, and sexual orientation swapped super-hero characters? Why wasn't there a concentrated effort on all of the already existing female super-hero characters who were already popular, and who were all selling well? You would think that there would be an emphasis on Wonder Woman comics, her presence in the Justice League comic book would be much more prevalent, there would be an emphasis on Supergirl and Batgirl comics, and apart from DC Comics, in Marvel Comics, there would be an emphasis on the Wasp, her presence in the Avengers comic book would be much more prevalent, there would be an emphasis on the Invisible Woman and Phoenix comics. But you notice, there wasn't. That's how you know that it was all bullshit. They never intended for super-heroines to get a fair shot. They blatanly and obviously just wanted to infiltrate the industries and take them over from within so that they could use them for political propaganda. And once they were done ruining those businesses, they would destroy them completely. That was their real ambition. That was their true goal all along.
@@Tyler_W Except the problem is partly women, because by and large as a sex they are mediators and conciliators, and so do not confront or call out their side for their obvious faults and flaws, instead willing to go along with those activists who try to lay all the blame they can upon men.
Here's another angle: Women went to the theatre to see Avengers and really liked Chris Hemsworth playing Thor because he's a buff dude. Then they go to the comic shop only to find out Thor is now a chick. Oh well, there goes a comics customer...
Coming from the North American Automotive Industry (90s to 00s), this is NOT surprising. You had then, as now, a C-Suite that was ego prone, and quarterly bound with little to none connection to their actual customer base. Nothing better than hearing from an exec about their trips to Martha's Vineyard or deciding a company that was geared for fleet sales to 'niche vehicles'. So... any surprise the current market is buying Japanese? Only question at this point will be if the U.S. government will tariff manga until U.S. artists are used? 😂😮😢
This, right here, is the problem with American businesses in full motion. Immoral dipshits like Chris Cox, Bobby Kotick, etc., and his kind driving these companies under for a golden parachute.
In terms of my personal experience, I think there's a very important thing to point out. As you mention there's a difference between shop customers and comic customers. I see girls in my comic shop but they aren't buying comics when I see them look at things. They could be buying posters toys or other merchandise. I buy those things too, but also I pick up comics.
When I teach statistics, we talk about if a survey is accurate. This poll has so many problems that it should’ve been thrown out. I am a woman who did read Marvel comics and some DC comics. However, if you asked if I knew any other women who read comics, they were just my three female cousins. My sister didn’t read comics, none of my female classmates did, and certainly no one in my social circles did.
It SHOULD have been thrown out, but it wasn't...on purpose. There were people involved that knew the truth, but they manipulated and coerced the right people to push it forward anyway. They saw an opportunity to gain influence and power and they took it.
I worked in retail for 30 years. Management frequently told us Angry Karen customers were our best customers, while shoplifters were great customers who received poor service. Our company sensitivity training videos prove it, with a script written in a single brainstorming session by managers who just graduated from college with a business degree. The More You Know.
There's this prophecy that says when you finally find that mythical "modern audience" you have been searching for so long you gain eternal happiness and sunshine.
While it's largely true they didn't, I think they could have. The biggest problem and obstacle to that is the fact that the industry's business model frankly sucks.
@@Tyler_W Did you know that the Iron Man run that happened after 2007's movie had Tony dealing with S.H.I.E.L.D. and Obidiah Stane? No? Well, that's because you didn't go out and buy Iron Man comics after the movie. You know what DOES comics? Cartoons. The 1991 Batman cartoon got kids to collect the comics. Because Adults think comics are for children and losers, always have and always will.
It's why I think that every single MCU movie should have had a "like this? Read the comics!" and a link to comic shop finder. It was utterly stupid that they didn't try to market their own comics with the movies.
If you don't get into comics as a young kid you probably never will. Trouble is these books are way beyond pocket money prices now. I'm guessing the only way you're going to get a new audiance is by having a family member pass on there love for these things to you.
I run a comic shop in the U.K. for over a year & confirm that of our 140 standing orders we had 4/5 females that had a standing order. Also at the height of the MCU less & less people were buying comics (people seem to of brought merch instead) Imagine how bad it is now.
I for one am not buying Batman books anymore. In my 20+ years I’ve been collecting comics I’VE NEVER stopped buying Batman books! Why? Well, because the industry is in the process of cucking, emasculating every major male, manly, boss superhero in the western world! And Batman and his villains have been main victims of this. They had to thread back with Superman because their attempt at shelving the REAL Superman (KalEl) backfired big time!
I'm an old dude..bought comics for decades .. especially Batman..and you're right . Fuck it..they just suck now... obviously in the fans face ..enough I'm done.
Another problem with this "strategy" of attracting female audience to a male dominated hobby was they didn't make it easy for female as well. They usually don't go to comic shops. If they sold comics in more neutral places like manga does (like every supermarket, convenience store, and bookstore), it would help with accessibility. However, by making distribution very comic shop centric, it doesn't matter if they make comics more female oriented, they won't go to comic shops. It doesn't help further with making comic shops life harder. Manga specific for male audience have a decent % of female readers (around 20~40%) without making their stories worse for males and pandering for females. They may add some pretty face and that's about it. Manga works because they are everywhere. Both male and females can check out mangas out of their target audience very easily. Attracting the other audience is just treated as a bonus. The executives are super lazy with their strategies. That's why they hire these weirdo "activities" instead of thinking about how to be inclusive themselves. In the past, comics would make comics for female audience instead of forcing male focused ones into becoming female oriented. They are lazy and don't care because their main businesses are outside comics.
If there are so many women comic book fans who aren't just manga or web comics fans, why aren't they showing up for the female lead movies? We all know because the movie industry provides much better demographic numbers than comics that more men show up for female lead comic book movies than women.
those numbers are definitely a lie/deceptive, i bet they included girls cosplaying with this data. women rarely cared for comics at all even for those generation who grew up with it, girls back then would rather buy a romance novel. this is just copium at this point.
Iv been going to my local comic shop for the past 15 years evey single week to collect my comics. Never have i once in my life saw a woman buying comics in all that time. Yeah iv seen women work as at the store or some women playing during card tournaments held at my shop, but again, every person iv seen buy comics were guys. Remember my comic shop owner even talked to me about this subject when it came to Jonah Hexs grand daughter getting a book. And he told me stunts like that never attracted any girls to his shop to buy it. You might get that spike in the first appearance where speculators might come, but none that have become weekly customers
I've taken rudimentary college courses teaching polling, and data collection. A massive corporation didn't understand the difference between scientific polling and not? How is it possible they listened to a Facebook poll? Unbelievable. EDIT: i could see "idiocy" or ignorance being a culprit. A lot of people dont undertand that there are differences in polls, and certain checks have to be in place to make sure your data set is good.
The thing that is infuriating about this whole issue is that it doesn't have to be "either/or." The mainstream publishers could have created new lines designed specifically to appeal to female readers to go out and capture those millions of folks who theoretically want to read those comics, while still doing the kinds of comics that the traditional comic reader wants. On the other hand, if this argument is accurate, that means there is a huge underserved readership that wants the more traditional stories -- it's too bad that more smaller and indie publishers don't fill that void and create comics that will appeal to the neglected traditional reader. You don't have to have just one thing and not the other -- there is room for all kinds of storytelling in comics.
Here’s my question: Once they started changing comics to go after this alleged audience saw sales and interest in comics going down why did they keep doubling and tripling down on it?!?
i saw this and kept this page to constantly mulling Over and it never ever Lined up with me... it never transitioned to sales... they say half of these people are female - MOST females don't or would never Indulge w comics in that way for every 15 your gonna be surprised to discover 3-5 would read em.. if I'm correct was it a woman who Sheppard this statement?
Comic Fans and Comic Buyers are different distinctions, but also remember that manga is considered "comics," and I don't doubt those stats when manga is included. This downplays the importance or even statistical relevance of who buys their comics/manga at comic book specialty shops and would have to include digital readers, webcomics readers, etc. But this looks like a decision in search of a statistic.
As someone who works with numbers everyday I can tell you, anyone with a little bit of imagination can make numbers say whatever they want. It's really not that hard.
And I think that's almost certainly what happened here. Activists & good-intentioned progressives (ie. idiots) collide with a bad data set & intentions of social engineering resulted in astroturfed stupidity. Activists convince good-intentioned progressives that the solid internal data they have about their company's performance on gender splits deviate very severely from the "industry norm", so they should totally change it to be the good even split they desire for.
you are correct. they are decreasing the male audience. I (a male) for one have stopped following anything Marvel completely. tired of the gender swap, race swap, fluff stories, woke input.
The thing that is weird for me is that DC and Marvel should have IPs for a female demographic. I'm not an active comic fan like most who follow these channels, but I like researching stuff like this and Marvel has characters like Millie the Model who hasn't been around in ages. They can rebrand her to appeal to modern girls, and you can cut most of the superhero stuff or only use it in ways that other successful girl media does.
in my short time (2year) working with a comic book shop in Philippines, I only listed 12 young people (age 5 to 20) buy American comics. Most of the American comic buyers are also 40 to 70 year old. in my 12 years working in several bookoff branch in Japan, people buying American comic books that aren't translated tend to be 20 to 30 yo people. people buying translated American comic books also go from age 12 to probably 70 year old people.
I think that the majority of anyone that's successfully run a taco truck for more than 12 months could be better at running comics than the current folks running comics.
Several women worked at my local comic shop when it was open. But all of them openly talked s#!t about comics. The only woman I ever saw shop there was my girl.
I disagree with dok’s theory that they decreased the male readers and kept the female readers the same or added a few. I bet they not only decreased the male readers but also decreased the female readers because any female readers who already existed liked things as they were when they appealed to men. I don’t think existing female fans would like these changes any more than existing male fans would. The females they did get to talk about comics I’m sure mostly pirated them anyway
I think my point was that since the female audience was already a small %, then the numbers they lost from the female side were potentially offset or exceeded by the numbers they gained when they changed the style. Say it's already 90/10 male/female and you have 1M customers. That's 900k M/100k F, if you drive off 80% of both audiences evenly, that brings it down to still 90/10 but only out of 200k instead of 1M. So now it's 180k M/ 20K F. Since the number of female readers needed to be gained to offset the number of female readers lost is a lot smaller it could be more reasonably be achieved. It's easier to regain 80K women than 720K men, if that makes sense?
The movies were a death kiss for the industry. The mainstream became aware of my beloved stories and raped them to death right in front of me. Then they told me they did it for me and the betterment of mankind. I haven’t bought a comic since 2016 and that’s unlikely to ever change. You know what’s worse is I didn’t quit reading the comics over the culture war, wasn’t aware of it in 2016 really, it was all the multiverse garbage. I’m sick of 50 version of every character and endless deaths that always mean nothing. It’s dead Jim
Okay... Am I the only one who had any class in statistic, because one of the first thing you have to acknowledge in those class is that statistic say mostly what you want them to say. And let be honest, using facebook as a source on a social topic his like asking a fast food business to write a diet program for diabetes patient. At the end of the day, bad character in a good story can pass, but good character in bad story will go down in sale every time.
Women tend to gravitate towards things that are popular, they see something is widely liked and then they decide they like it too. It’s why we see so much brain rot around the Mushoku Tensei anime, it got popular, a lot of people moved onto it and then the endless complaints started around Rudy and his behaviour, which is actually really tame in comparison to even a mild ecchi. And they also complained about slavery being used in the series, it’s set in a medieval period, slavery is a part of everyday life. And we had all these people complaining that Rudy doesn’t behave like a progressive in 2024, it’s mind boggling.
The most baffling thing to me is that IF the 45% poll was correct, those female fans were there for the CURRENT (at the time) action driven comics. Not sure where the impulse to change shit comes from, but lemme tell you about women. When we say, “Just like that. Don’t stop.” Do NOT change tempo, rhythm or direction. Keep doing what the fuck you’re doing!
My nephews are in their late teens through early 20s and I had to stop talking with them about comic books. Because, in their minds, there seems to be no distinction at all between comic book movies, comic themed video games, and actual comic books. When you mention “comics” then they immediately think you’re talking about the MCU or the latest Arkham Asylum game. But I really don’t think they are unique in that mindset and that’s what the vast majority of “normies” think of when you say “comics”. So that seems to make this “data” even more irrelevant.
The hilarious part is that if 46% of their fans were women, then it seemed like what they were doing at the time was working for both men and women and there was never a need to make it more female centric.
We are talking about people who rarely use their brains : You expect them to understand basic math and logic ? You have a better chance winning the lottery twice in a row.
Marvel went to shit after Joe Quesada stepped down as editor in chief. I'm not the biggest fan of him but at least he mostly understood their audience and was able to bring in a lot of talent.
The same thing happened in video games. Market research did polls of stats of "video gamers" showing that there was roughly a 50/50 split between men and women who play games. But the data was based on counting every person who ever plays any form of game to any degree. Someone who played solitaire on PC or Words with Friends on their phone once in the past year would count just as much as someone who plays 10+ hours a week playing core audience games. That's not exactly wrong data, but it's pretty useless as market research. Knowing that a person likes playing what's effectively scrabble on their phone does not really help you determine if you can sell them a copy of Halo on an Xbox. But of course this research got touted heavily in the gaming press, and led to consulting groups pushing the need to appeal to women. And game companies then feminized the game series that were clearly drawing a predominantly male audience up to that point.
There was no need to create superhero comics for women. If they wanted more female readers, they should have done more things like Sandman, Fables, and Books Of Magic.
Y sabes lo peor de todo, es que lo tenía, tenía público femenino con esa historia, pero son estúpido por dejarse llevar por activistas osea(lesbiana enojadas con el mundo)que creen que igual tiene que ser para todos cuando no es así la mayoría de mujeres no le gusta las historias de superhéroes, le gustan las historias sobrenaturales como esas que mencionaste las que nombraste
Female heroes are not the issue, we had plenty of great heroines. It's the forced aspect that's the issue. Plus, we always had sexy male and female characters so the issue of objectification goes both ways.
I don't doubt there are (or rather were) girls/women interested in (super-hero) comic books and I actually applaud this. Heck, I met my wife 24 years ago through our shared love of comic books and the X-Men's Rogue character in particular. But to take her as an example, she used to love Marvel comics and easily read 20-30 titles a month. These days she's down to a handful of comics, none of them in the super-hero genre and has switched almost completely to reading manga which simply entertains her a lot more, entertainment being the keyword here (as Mike Baron put it so well). Why, because she hates most current comics and all the problems surrounding them. This whole idea that you need to change the basic concept of what made a good super-hero comic book is completely wrong and is more likely to push away any women that might have shown interest instead of attracting them.
So instead of keeping the same recipe that seems to have worked and actually attracted a small female audience to begin with, they chose to change the recipe from the ground up which not only alienated and reduced the male audience (dominant ratio), it also alienated and reduced the female audience that actually liked what was made prior to the shift in focus. The two different demographics, that together made up a bunch of longtime and faithful comicbook fans (which keep the industry alive through their commitment to the medium), were downgraded exponentially by that shift. Of course the male to female reader ratio changed these past years ; the whole readership sample size dwindled because the quality of stories went down the drain and the characters lost layers to the point of flanderization. It's a loss on every aspect.
Yeah, ask any woman and they will proudly say "Yes, l love that Peter Palmer and Super Avengers!" And they won't even have to look up from their phones to declare it.
Probably I’m an exception but I am a woman and I liked comics way better before. I’m not a big fan of romance and I prefer reading about actions and adventures. I like slice of life but it shouldn’t affect too much the main plot of a superhero comics (which is action/adventure). Older comics were much more interesting to read.
Wes, topic for you and Doc (along with the rest of "Comic UA-cam"): Will there be lobbying for the U.S. Federal Government to sponsor the medium similar to what Canada does with Cartoon Shorts?
It's puching the woke/LGBTI+"message" that was the problem. That's why they changed their writing style. They won't admit things are going wrong. Remember-"denial ain't a river in Egypt ".
You can have a lot of female characters and still have it aimed at a male audience. Manga does this, I have hundreds of volumes where it’s nearly entirely female characters. The problem comics has it adds female characters but they don’t write them to appeal to the male audience. They all act like men & do nothing but act in a terrible way & turn everyone off, because they think they need to be all boss characters, it’s terrible.
I think you're being very generous when you say for every customer they have gained they have driven off ten. It wasn't that long ago that it hit comic sold fifty thousand copies versus the ten or twelve thousand now. Obviously. That question was designed to get a certain response based on the popularity of the movies and a lot of the women who enjoyed the movies enjoyed them because of the attractive men in them. That's literally what women say when asked about the movies.
Around 11:50 you talked about the MCU movies... What about mothers buying comics for their sons? 😅 A fb poll? Ppl are strange when you're a stranger....
Sabes DC y Marvel pueden atraer público femenino de verdad dandole lo que quieren DC lo hizo DC vértigo y sobretodo con el universo the Sandman el propio Niel dijo que the Sandman tenía más lectores femeninas de uno alrededor de 70% eran mujeres y tiene sentido ya que lo sobrenatural o fantasía en el género que más consumen una mujer
Ya know, 10 years ago it was probably around 46%, when the dark knight came out every young girl dressed as Harley Quinn, changed their facebook name to include Harley Quinn. Now they dropped off and went to manga or back to barbie and we're stuck with comics for girls and activists
I believe they knew the numbers were "potential" customers and not current comicbook customers, but they got highed on that and pushed in one direction without thinking how it would affect the rest of their fanbase. Even within manga, where the female percentage is higher (probably close to that 50%), females' titles are mostly different from those males read. Marvel and DC are on genre within the comicbook/graphic novel, and like it or not, it is male. Even the european comics, that are not superheroes' genre, it's still 2/3 male. They should've created a couple of titles to lure the female market, or add compelling and well written female characters in group titles. Or if things were good, even open a line more focused on the female readers. All WITHOUT screwing their customer base 😂 the same could be said for all DEI characters and plots. Ive lost all interest in the mutant side of Marvel (except Wolverine and Hickman's P/H of X) and I think it will take years till that changes. Getting close to the same point with Cap.A and Avengers ... Only cool titles that are keeping me are the more horror ones (Ghost Rider, Hulk), Ultimate Spiderman and some mini series from time to time).
From what I've seen in dozens of comics shops I've been in, the ratio is about 90/10 male/female, and it's stayed the same this whole time. Even with our original live-action videos and comics which feature all female characters, our sales are still overwhelmingly male. The females who want to support our series tend to buy stickers or signed photos. This is as true for us as it is for a series like FemForce, which has been running since the 80s. Denial is nothing more than a river in Egypt.
...wait a minute, so we've had to deal with 10 years of poor quality in both stories and creators, because of a poll on Facebook?!!
Crazy, huh?
So stupid that it's actually true. Welcome to clown world.
You could blame the poll but it's because of the terrible business decisions made by Marvel, DC etc.
They didn't have to change the way they did things but they wanted to and the poll was their excuse.
If it hadn't been that particular poll, it would have been some other cockamamie 'study'. They were simply looking for an excuse to implement an agenda, which wasn't just about women, either - it was the entire intersectional array of 'marginalized identities'.
And I thought I hated Facebook before finding this out 😂
There was a large segment of comic book professionals who jumped on this. They knew it was wrong. They didn't care because they wanted it to be true.
even if it was true, they could have at least made quality comics that pandered to women, like how they do in japan. Sailor moon, cardcaptor sakura, chobits, etc. We didn't get anything like that because what they actually wanted was to pander to themselves.
Its the same way the "polls" that say more gamers are women but that counts candy crush and phone games etc that 60 year old women play. Just like comics the females that were actual fans of games liked them the way they were before all the pandering and self insert nonsense.
I know a few women who like the marvel movies, more so, in fact than I do. But, unlike me, I don't think that any of them have ever bought a marvel comic book in their lives.
Nope & that's why they like the MSHEU!😂
@ensabahnur7657 no they don't. Nobody likes the "M-She-U." It's not gaining new female audiences because they were mever inclined to like this brand in the first place, and it's driving away the women who were already fans because they already liked it for the same reasons the men did.
@@Tyler_W indeed but it is what it is!
My girlfriend actually liked the Marvels.
@@Whalewraith I'm so sorry😪
They bought into "if you build it, they will come". They never showed up. And the ones that did, were stealing it 😂
It’s like those big empty cities in China. The real estate market is finally beginning to tank China’s economy.
It was confirmation bias, they used that one data point to use as a basis for their new business model and assumed their fan base would go along with it.
Its the same trick they used to claim that 49% of gamers are female, but what they ignored to mention when you actually look at the data reports had to add mobile in there. While the industry likes to pretend that '"traditional gaming" & mobile gaming are one and the same simply isnt true. 70% of that 49 claimed female demographic exclusive plays mobile games like Candy Crush, Patience, Animal Farm, various fashion games and doesnt show any interest what so ever in traditional gaming. I agree witth Dok that it is malice, there is decades of prove what demographic likes and where they are, but they like to play make believe
This. The Western game industry is filled with loud minority of activists killing the business to cater to people who don't like games.
I've known women all my life whi were into traditional gaming, but those were always the tomboyish tyoes who were already inclined toward more boyish interests in general, and even then, they were far more often than not fans of games they could play with other people. Some of them like the single player stuff, but only if it's shorter experiences with a clearly defined story and not the kind of giant open ended games that you can basically live in for months like it was a part time job.
Lol. All I know is in my 2 LCS, the idea of a 50/50 gender split is laughable.
All they had to do was ask the shop owners. But nooooooooooo!
I actually do see women show up on the occasion I pop by my LCS, just about every time, but there are maybe 1 and no more than 2 for every 8 or 9 men.
A similar study was conducted in relation to video games, where it concluded that around 50% of all users were women. The thing they left out was the fact that the data they used to arrive at that number included everyone who casually played games on their phones. This has resulted in a lot of nonsense happening in the AAA space, which has slowly been killing the industry in the Western part of the world.
It would not be surprising if this were a coordinated act to destroy male-centric hobbies.
Good luck getting rid of hunting and fishing.
He didn't really cover the ideological side of it at that point because its effects hadn't really become fully apparent at the time in 2017, but one of Colin Moriarty's last videos with Kinda Funny in his Colin Was Right series is still one the definitive condemnations of the corrosive influence of mobile on the rest of gaming. The video was appropriately titled, "How Mobile Gaming Ruined Everything - Colin Was Right." He released it not long before he got the boot from his company because the cancel pigs tried to lynch him on Twitter over a dad joke on international women's day. He still does good work in general, but this is still one of his crowning achievements.
This is why I'm buying older comics. The new ones just aren't fun or interesting.
Even the art work was much superior in the bronze age.
They just count the cosplayers of Black Cat, Black widow, Catwoman, Poison Ivy...
Marvel needs a complete company wide reboot, with everything these hacktivists done, made non-canon, and most importantly, all the hacktivists removed immediately.
Wkth the exception of a few isolated books here or there, the Marvel Universe as a whole wrapped up with Secret Wars in 2015 as far as I'm concerned. You could see the early stages of infiltration before that, but it spuraled out of control with All-New, All-Diffeeent. As far as the DCU goes, Doomsday Clock was the bookend for me.
SIXTY plus years of SALES were thrown out the window because of ONE poll on FACEBOOK of all things.....and current day is where that lled us.
Comics dead, movies dead, games getting infected too.....SALES at an ALL TIME LOW across all entertainment; and still they go on like it's a good decision.
We live in a clownsworld.
Comics are Not fun Any more
Tbh they never were. Just read manga
@@reginaldforthright805 not true. Let’s not generalize.
Some still are, just support the good ones. Fuck the rest
@@Michael33666 those are great recommendations. I agree.
@@reginaldforthright805 Mangas a great and all but, Comic a 🔥🔥 but Transformers Sound good so let me Check them out
There's a fundamental miscalculation here on the part of Marvel and DC, they think that because women like slice of life and romance Manga/Novels that they can just shoehorn it into already existing superhero comics and expect women to flock to them, they can't and they won't. Why would any woman read a superhero slice of life comic when they could just read a slice of life Manga without the baggage, without the superhero tropes and without the nonsense?
Wait. So you didn't like the issue where the team went to the farmer's market?
@@Barbel1th Oh wait, that did happen. Holy shit. I forgot about that.
@krs4395 Based RuriDragon pfp.
@@Barbel1th Are you for real!? Did that actually happen!!!???
I've barely been scraping by with comics at all due to the poor writing, so I probably missed this if it did.
@@djktsjytej Yes, this happened. I can't remember the series, but I watch a comic review stream where they went over the issue. It is now my go-to gag for how ridiculous the comics industry has become with this DEI garbage.
Hey Wes, could you talk (since you're talking about women) how Marvel and DC have destroyed their female characters since the arrival of 2010 onwards, but above all, DC with Wonder Woman, Catwoman that she created are the most affected since the new 52, because it would be great an analysis of how these iconic characters are screwed by bad writing due to boss decisions
I'm not sure this is what Jack Kirby meant when he said Comics would break your heart.
There's nothing wrong with trying to attract women to comics. But you don't alienate the current customer base to do so. They could have added some comics that appeal to women but not change the main line of comics.
Marvel tried that ages ago, Dazzler, Spider Woman, She Hulk. Besides speculators most of the readers of these comics were still male.
They were still superhero books however. There are action based shojo Manga, but to my knowledge girls like usually like more personal stories.
@@janjoubert3225 Don't forget Night Nurse.
It's not going to happen. Most women don't like superhero comics at all. I don't buy those stats at all. Whoever posted the data made it up or they are including non-superhero comics. You can go to any comic book store and count the female to male customer numbers. I think if asked there are many women who might say they like superhero comic book movies, but they are casual fans. A small group who controlled the companies ruined comics for everyone based on flawed information. It was an audience that never existed. Thank you Wes and Dok! I miss spinner racks. lol OMG. I've got the next DC push. Bat Barbie. It'll be the new 54.
Ask random females to tell u about the terminator and they won't know anything other then a robot and Arnold.
Ask a random male and he would be able to tell you almost everything about terminator. Men and women are different no matter how hard they try they can't change biology
There's a HUGE difference between a COMIC FAN who buys actual COMICS week-in and week-out, and someone who only likes COMIC ICONOGRAPHY who might only have a comic character T-SHIRT and goes to the MOVIES.
Science fiction ran into this problem decades ago and conventions started to reflect it, when the genre moved more from literature to media with the sudden popularity of a particular film. A fan of television and movie sf is a completely different fan than a fan who read science fiction, and the movies were always several years behind what was going on in the literature. By the 90’s I’d pretty much stopped going to sf conventions because they’d become media cons and the writers were relegated to afterthoughts, and the comic book conventions followed suit.
When Hollywood used the comic book fandom to launch successful comic book films by actually adapting the stories as they appeared in the books, they took away the wrong lesson from the popularity of those films and believed all those numbers reflected potential comic book readers which they didn’t.
I predict Marvel and DC Comics will go the way of Atari. Anyone else remember the American video game pioneer that overinvested in making products its customers did NOT want, driving itself bankrupt and killing the American video game industry in the early 1980s, before Nintendo revived this industry by making Americans buy imported products?
We're buying manga and manhwa (Korean comics) because American comic book companies keep repeating Atari's mistake.
Very good research! That ET game is one of the causes of that crash, and activists are worse than just over saturation of the market
They don’t learn from history. They think they are above all that.
I agree. I have been saying that either Marvel or DC will, at the very least, fold shop on producing monthly comics within a year. They may option characters out, but they have mismanaged these companies for so long that eventually they'll just sell out and close shop. They know nothing about their clients, and worst of all, they couldn't care less. And THAT is a terrible way to do business.
@@BrianRidgway-u5g ellos solo le importa las licencias para hacer: películas, videojuegos, y juguetes y mucho más ahora va hacer terrible para estos "escritores" que un verdadero señor de negocios vea el desastre que son estás empresas en la parte editorial y se dará cuenta que no vale la pena por salvarla ya que si toda la industria está mal
Even if the data was legit, that does not mean female fans of comics would buy more comics if they were changed to pander to women in general. It is like assuming that men who like Barbie would buy more Barbie if they bumped up her breast size and made her work the pole. That may attract the attention of a few guys outside the fandom but chances are it would alienate the existing fanbase.
The infuriating part is that their idea of 'making comics for women' was simply to "put a chick in it and make it lame." Publishers didn't release books that looked like Outlander, or A Court of Rose and Thrones, or an anthology adapting various Mary Higgins Clark stories in hopes of appealing to what women actually like...No, they just took stories/characters intended for guys, and ruined them.
Had the headline said that 4.6% comic fans are female i would have absolutely believed it,. It's definitely not 46%, not even close.
Helllllllllllllll no!😎
Thats exactly what I was thinking. A decade of terrible comics, all because of a misplaced decimal!
You can totally tell that it was deliberately designed to be a feminist conspiracy against male-dominated hobbies like video games, comic books and anime. If they were honest about it, and not being so disingenuous, even if the statistics and the data showed that there was a definite increase in female readers of comic books, why was there such a concentrated effort on downplaying the male super-hero characters and replacing them with race swapped, gender swapped, and sexual orientation swapped super-hero characters? Why wasn't there a concentrated effort on all of the already existing female super-hero characters who were already popular, and who were all selling well?
You would think that there would be an emphasis on Wonder Woman comics, her presence in the Justice League comic book would be much more prevalent, there would be an emphasis on Supergirl and Batgirl comics, and apart from DC Comics, in Marvel Comics, there would be an emphasis on the Wasp, her presence in the Avengers comic book would be much more prevalent, there would be an emphasis on the Invisible Woman and Phoenix comics. But you notice, there wasn't. That's how you know that it was all bullshit.
They never intended for super-heroines to get a fair shot. They blatanly and obviously just wanted to infiltrate the industries and take them over from within so that they could use them for political propaganda. And once they were done ruining those businesses, they would destroy them completely. That was their real ambition. That was their true goal all along.
Women like to fight stealth wars, and this is a stealth war against the male gender.. But the spotlight is now shining on it.
@@teastrainer3604 wrong focus. The problem isn't "women." It's ideologically possessed activists.
@@Tyler_W Except the problem is partly women, because by and large as a sex they are mediators and conciliators, and so do not confront or call out their side for their obvious faults and flaws, instead willing to go along with those activists who try to lay all the blame they can upon men.
@@Tyler_W I didn't say all women. Most women don't give a crap about this. But the ones who do are the problem.
Gary at Nerdrotic put it spectacularly, "Show me your long boxes."
Right? Has Heather Antos ever read a comic book for fun in her life?
Here's another angle: Women went to the theatre to see Avengers and really liked Chris Hemsworth playing Thor because he's a buff dude.
Then they go to the comic shop only to find out Thor is now a chick. Oh well, there goes a comics customer...
I remember reading an article about Barbie toy sales post the movie and it really boosted Ken sales a lot
Coming from the North American Automotive Industry (90s to 00s), this is NOT surprising. You had then, as now, a C-Suite that was ego prone, and quarterly bound with little to none connection to their actual customer base. Nothing better than hearing from an exec about their trips to Martha's Vineyard or deciding a company that was geared for fleet sales to 'niche vehicles'. So... any surprise the current market is buying Japanese? Only question at this point will be if the U.S. government will tariff manga until U.S. artists are used? 😂😮😢
This, right here, is the problem with American businesses in full motion.
Immoral dipshits like Chris Cox, Bobby Kotick, etc., and his kind driving these companies under for a golden parachute.
In terms of my personal experience, I think there's a very important thing to point out. As you mention there's a difference between shop customers and comic customers. I see girls in my comic shop but they aren't buying comics when I see them look at things. They could be buying posters toys or other merchandise. I buy those things too, but also I pick up comics.
When I teach statistics, we talk about if a survey is accurate. This poll has so many problems that it should’ve been thrown out.
I am a woman who did read Marvel comics and some DC comics. However, if you asked if I knew any other women who read comics, they were just my three female cousins. My sister didn’t read comics, none of my female classmates did, and certainly no one in my social circles did.
It SHOULD have been thrown out, but it wasn't...on purpose. There were people involved that knew the truth, but they manipulated and coerced the right people to push it forward anyway. They saw an opportunity to gain influence and power and they took it.
DEI grifters, and grifters of all kinds, have been tricking people exactly this way for as long as con men have existed.
Absolutely!
when i was a kid i there was a woman in the comic shop my mum or grandma im sure some go there but not much i have seen
Go to a comic shop Wednesday at 11am. 25 men and one woman every other week.
I worked in retail for 30 years. Management frequently told us Angry Karen customers were our best customers, while shoplifters were great customers who received poor service. Our company sensitivity training videos prove it, with a script written in a single brainstorming session by managers who just graduated from college with a business degree. The More You Know.
There's this prophecy that says when you finally find that mythical "modern audience" you have been searching for so long you gain eternal happiness and sunshine.
I TOLD YOU ALL! THE MOVIES NEVER MOVED THE NEEDLE! THEY NEVER WILL!
While it's largely true they didn't, I think they could have. The biggest problem and obstacle to that is the fact that the industry's business model frankly sucks.
@@Tyler_W Did you know that the Iron Man run that happened after 2007's movie had Tony dealing with S.H.I.E.L.D. and Obidiah Stane? No? Well, that's because you didn't go out and buy Iron Man comics after the movie.
You know what DOES comics? Cartoons. The 1991 Batman cartoon got kids to collect the comics. Because Adults think comics are for children and losers, always have and always will.
It's why I think that every single MCU movie should have had a "like this? Read the comics!" and a link to comic shop finder. It was utterly stupid that they didn't try to market their own comics with the movies.
@@BitchspotBlogor have stories of the source material sold at the theathers. Maybe even give away 🤷♂️
If you don't get into comics as a young kid you probably never will. Trouble is these books are way beyond pocket money prices now. I'm guessing the only way you're going to get a new audiance is by having a family member pass on there love for these things to you.
I run a comic shop in the U.K. for over a year & confirm that of our 140 standing orders we had 4/5 females that had a standing order. Also at the height of the MCU less & less people were buying comics (people seem to of brought merch instead) Imagine how bad it is now.
I for one am not buying Batman books anymore. In my 20+ years I’ve been collecting comics I’VE NEVER stopped buying Batman books!
Why? Well, because the industry is in the process of cucking, emasculating every major male, manly, boss superhero in the western world! And Batman and his villains have been main victims of this.
They had to thread back with Superman because their attempt at shelving the REAL Superman (KalEl) backfired big time!
Bro all you had to say was Tom king and we would have all understood lol and chip isn’t any better imo that shit is garbage
@@lujanwelch4567 agreed
I'm an old dude..bought comics for decades .. especially Batman..and you're right .
Fuck it..they just suck now... obviously in the fans face ..enough I'm done.
Did I say I was old?...gosh.
I don’t recognize this new Batman anymore. Sincerely, a girl who love the real Batman (not the shit Tom King created)
Another problem with this "strategy" of attracting female audience to a male dominated hobby was they didn't make it easy for female as well. They usually don't go to comic shops. If they sold comics in more neutral places like manga does (like every supermarket, convenience store, and bookstore), it would help with accessibility. However, by making distribution very comic shop centric, it doesn't matter if they make comics more female oriented, they won't go to comic shops. It doesn't help further with making comic shops life harder.
Manga specific for male audience have a decent % of female readers (around 20~40%) without making their stories worse for males and pandering for females. They may add some pretty face and that's about it. Manga works because they are everywhere. Both male and females can check out mangas out of their target audience very easily. Attracting the other audience is just treated as a bonus.
The executives are super lazy with their strategies. That's why they hire these weirdo "activities" instead of thinking about how to be inclusive themselves. In the past, comics would make comics for female audience instead of forcing male focused ones into becoming female oriented. They are lazy and don't care because their main businesses are outside comics.
If there are so many women comic book fans who aren't just manga or web comics fans, why aren't they showing up for the female lead movies? We all know because the movie industry provides much better demographic numbers than comics that more men show up for female lead comic book movies than women.
those numbers are definitely a lie/deceptive, i bet they included girls cosplaying with this data. women rarely cared for comics at all even for those generation who grew up with it, girls back then would rather buy a romance novel. this is just copium at this point.
Its not about money, its about the message. That is something these types live and D1e by
Iv been going to my local comic shop for the past 15 years evey single week to collect my comics. Never have i once in my life saw a woman buying comics in all that time. Yeah iv seen women work as at the store or some women playing during card tournaments held at my shop, but again, every person iv seen buy comics were guys.
Remember my comic shop owner even talked to me about this subject when it came to Jonah Hexs grand daughter getting a book. And he told me stunts like that never attracted any girls to his shop to buy it. You might get that spike in the first appearance where speculators might come, but none that have become weekly customers
I've taken rudimentary college courses teaching polling, and data collection. A massive corporation didn't understand the difference between scientific polling and not? How is it possible they listened to a Facebook poll? Unbelievable.
EDIT: i could see "idiocy" or ignorance being a culprit. A lot of people dont undertand that there are differences in polls, and certain checks have to be in place to make sure your data set is good.
The thing that is infuriating about this whole issue is that it doesn't have to be "either/or." The mainstream publishers could have created new lines designed specifically to appeal to female readers to go out and capture those millions of folks who theoretically want to read those comics, while still doing the kinds of comics that the traditional comic reader wants.
On the other hand, if this argument is accurate, that means there is a huge underserved readership that wants the more traditional stories -- it's too bad that more smaller and indie publishers don't fill that void and create comics that will appeal to the neglected traditional reader.
You don't have to have just one thing and not the other -- there is room for all kinds of storytelling in comics.
Here’s my question: Once they started changing comics to go after this alleged audience saw sales and interest in comics going down why did they keep doubling and tripling down on it?!?
The studios believed the shoddy data because they wanted it to be true.
i saw this and kept this page to constantly mulling Over and it never ever Lined up with me... it never transitioned to sales... they say half of these people are female - MOST females don't or would never Indulge w comics in that way for every 15 your gonna be surprised to discover 3-5 would read em.. if I'm correct was it a woman who Sheppard this statement?
Half female?!?🤣🤣🤣
Even if that were true did they bother to poll what titles specifically
Or
Making sure they aren’t talking about movies.
10 Years to Ruin Something.
10 Years until the Nerds Get their hands on the Tools to Revive it
Comic Fans and Comic Buyers are different distinctions, but also remember that manga is considered "comics," and I don't doubt those stats when manga is included. This downplays the importance or even statistical relevance of who buys their comics/manga at comic book specialty shops and would have to include digital readers, webcomics readers, etc. But this looks like a decision in search of a statistic.
I never see women in my local lcs!
I’ve always seen women in my LCS, and that was even all the way back in the 80’s, but those women were rare.
As someone who works with numbers everyday I can tell you, anyone with a little bit of imagination can make numbers say whatever they want. It's really not that hard.
And I think that's almost certainly what happened here. Activists & good-intentioned progressives (ie. idiots) collide with a bad data set & intentions of social engineering resulted in astroturfed stupidity. Activists convince good-intentioned progressives that the solid internal data they have about their company's performance on gender splits deviate very severely from the "industry norm", so they should totally change it to be the good even split they desire for.
you are correct. they are decreasing the male audience. I (a male) for one have stopped following anything Marvel completely. tired of the gender swap, race swap, fluff stories, woke input.
The thing that is weird for me is that DC and Marvel should have IPs for a female demographic. I'm not an active comic fan like most who follow these channels, but I like researching stuff like this and Marvel has characters like Millie the Model who hasn't been around in ages. They can rebrand her to appeal to modern girls, and you can cut most of the superhero stuff or only use it in ways that other successful girl media does.
I think the comixology numbers are skewed because Amazon was giving away comics related to movies you bought.
in my short time (2year) working with a comic book shop in Philippines, I only listed 12 young people (age 5 to 20) buy American comics. Most of the American comic buyers are also 40 to 70 year old.
in my 12 years working in several bookoff branch in Japan, people buying American comic books that aren't translated tend to be 20 to 30 yo people. people buying translated American comic books also go from age 12 to probably 70 year old people.
Fun Fact: There's more women who watch more anime and do cosplay more than men.
At least anime appeals to both sexs
The more I hear about the comic industry, the more I think I could run it better than the people currently running it.
I think that the majority of anyone that's successfully run a taco truck for more than 12 months could be better at running comics than the current folks running comics.
Ya boi makes a great point, if 46% of comics fans are women then you’re already there. You didn’t have to change anything.
Several women worked at my local comic shop when it was open. But all of them openly talked s#!t about comics. The only woman I ever saw shop there was my girl.
I disagree with dok’s theory that they decreased the male readers and kept the female readers the same or added a few. I bet they not only decreased the male readers but also decreased the female readers because any female readers who already existed liked things as they were when they appealed to men. I don’t think existing female fans would like these changes any more than existing male fans would. The females they did get to talk about comics I’m sure mostly pirated them anyway
I certainly don’t like the changes.
I think my point was that since the female audience was already a small %, then the numbers they lost from the female side were potentially offset or exceeded by the numbers they gained when they changed the style. Say it's already 90/10 male/female and you have 1M customers. That's 900k M/100k F, if you drive off 80% of both audiences evenly, that brings it down to still 90/10 but only out of 200k instead of 1M. So now it's 180k M/ 20K F. Since the number of female readers needed to be gained to offset the number of female readers lost is a lot smaller it could be more reasonably be achieved. It's easier to regain 80K women than 720K men, if that makes sense?
The movies were a death kiss for the industry. The mainstream became aware of my beloved stories and raped them to death right in front of me. Then they told me they did it for me and the betterment of mankind. I haven’t bought a comic since 2016 and that’s unlikely to ever change. You know what’s worse is I didn’t quit reading the comics over the culture war, wasn’t aware of it in 2016 really, it was all the multiverse garbage. I’m sick of 50 version of every character and endless deaths that always mean nothing. It’s dead Jim
Okay... Am I the only one who had any class in statistic, because one of the first thing you have to acknowledge in those class is that statistic say mostly what you want them to say. And let be honest, using facebook as a source on a social topic his like asking a fast food business to write a diet program for diabetes patient. At the end of the day, bad character in a good story can pass, but good character in bad story will go down in sale every time.
Women tend to gravitate towards things that are popular, they see something is widely liked and then they decide they like it too.
It’s why we see so much brain rot around the Mushoku Tensei anime, it got popular, a lot of people moved onto it and then the endless complaints started around Rudy and his behaviour, which is actually really tame in comparison to even a mild ecchi.
And they also complained about slavery being used in the series, it’s set in a medieval period, slavery is a part of everyday life. And we had all these people complaining that Rudy doesn’t behave like a progressive in 2024, it’s mind boggling.
The most baffling thing to me is that IF the 45% poll was correct, those female fans were there for the CURRENT (at the time) action driven comics.
Not sure where the impulse to change shit comes from, but lemme tell you about women. When we say, “Just like that. Don’t stop.” Do NOT change tempo, rhythm or direction. Keep doing what the fuck you’re doing!
My nephews are in their late teens through early 20s and I had to stop talking with them about comic books. Because, in their minds, there seems to be no distinction at all between comic book movies, comic themed video games, and actual comic books. When you mention “comics” then they immediately think you’re talking about the MCU or the latest Arkham Asylum game. But I really don’t think they are unique in that mindset and that’s what the vast majority of “normies” think of when you say “comics”. So that seems to make this “data” even more irrelevant.
The diverse utopia of readers so Gail Simone could feel virtuous while banishing her enemies to the history dustbin never arrived
That dark "utopian" future world may still come to pass. We need to make sure that it never, ever does.
The hilarious part is that if 46% of their fans were women, then it seemed like what they were doing at the time was working for both men and women and there was never a need to make it more female centric.
We are talking about people who rarely use their brains : You expect them to understand basic math and logic ?
You have a better chance winning the lottery twice in a row.
Marvel went to shit after Joe Quesada stepped down as editor in chief. I'm not the biggest fan of him but at least he mostly understood their audience and was able to bring in a lot of talent.
The same thing happened in video games. Market research did polls of stats of "video gamers" showing that there was roughly a 50/50 split between men and women who play games. But the data was based on counting every person who ever plays any form of game to any degree. Someone who played solitaire on PC or Words with Friends on their phone once in the past year would count just as much as someone who plays 10+ hours a week playing core audience games. That's not exactly wrong data, but it's pretty useless as market research. Knowing that a person likes playing what's effectively scrabble on their phone does not really help you determine if you can sell them a copy of Halo on an Xbox.
But of course this research got touted heavily in the gaming press, and led to consulting groups pushing the need to appeal to women. And game companies then feminized the game series that were clearly drawing a predominantly male audience up to that point.
Superheroes comics become boring and uninteresting in the past decades. Mangas and indie comics are the only option in nowadays.
There was no need to create superhero comics for women. If they wanted more female readers, they should have done more things like Sandman, Fables, and Books Of Magic.
Y sabes lo peor de todo, es que lo tenía, tenía público femenino con esa historia, pero son estúpido por dejarse llevar por activistas osea(lesbiana enojadas con el mundo)que creen que igual tiene que ser para todos cuando no es así la mayoría de mujeres no le gusta las historias de superhéroes, le gustan las historias sobrenaturales como esas que mencionaste las que nombraste
Female heroes are not the issue, we had plenty of great heroines. It's the forced aspect that's the issue. Plus, we always had sexy male and female characters so the issue of objectification goes both ways.
I don't doubt there are (or rather were) girls/women interested in (super-hero) comic books and I actually applaud this. Heck, I met my wife 24 years ago through our shared love of comic books and the X-Men's Rogue character in particular. But to take her as an example, she used to love Marvel comics and easily read 20-30 titles a month. These days she's down to a handful of comics, none of them in the super-hero genre and has switched almost completely to reading manga which simply entertains her a lot more, entertainment being the keyword here (as Mike Baron put it so well). Why, because she hates most current comics and all the problems surrounding them. This whole idea that you need to change the basic concept of what made a good super-hero comic book is completely wrong and is more likely to push away any women that might have shown interest instead of attracting them.
EXCELLENT WORK. WES
Awesome work guys
When confirmation bias was allowed to dictate comics editorial direction. 😂
So instead of keeping the same recipe that seems to have worked and actually attracted a small female audience to begin with, they chose to change the recipe from the ground up which not only alienated and reduced the male audience (dominant ratio), it also alienated and reduced the female audience that actually liked what was made prior to the shift in focus.
The two different demographics, that together made up a bunch of longtime and faithful comicbook fans (which keep the industry alive through their commitment to the medium), were downgraded exponentially by that shift.
Of course the male to female reader ratio changed these past years ; the whole readership sample size dwindled because the quality of stories went down the drain and the characters lost layers to the point of flanderization.
It's a loss on every aspect.
I keep thinking of This is Spinal Tap, and the band trying to explain why their diminishing audience is actually a good thing
And yet none of the current comics are pushing a mill so that shows they even lost there fake audience as well 😂
Even if that poll were true why would your next step be to fundamentally change the entire industry and make it into an illustrated gay bar?
This is like how Disney Channel alienated family members in favor of courting A tween girl audience. That's just bad for business.
Yeah, ask any woman and they will proudly say "Yes, l love that Peter Palmer and Super Avengers!" And they won't even have to look up from their phones to declare it.
Probably I’m an exception but I am a woman and I liked comics way better before. I’m not a big fan of romance and I prefer reading about actions and adventures. I like slice of life but it shouldn’t affect too much the main plot of a superhero comics (which is action/adventure). Older comics were much more interesting to read.
GREAT THINKING CRITICAL MARVEL COMICS LOSING MONEY 💵 AND THEIR AUDIENCES
Wes, topic for you and Doc (along with the rest of "Comic UA-cam"): Will there be lobbying for the U.S. Federal Government to sponsor the medium similar to what Canada does with Cartoon Shorts?
PREACH !!!!!!
Wes please keep making these videos it is literally part of my day to watch you with some coffee.
It's puching the woke/LGBTI+"message" that was the problem. That's why they changed their writing style. They won't admit things are going wrong. Remember-"denial ain't a river in Egypt ".
You can have a lot of female characters and still have it aimed at a male audience. Manga does this, I have hundreds of volumes where it’s nearly entirely female characters.
The problem comics has it adds female characters but they don’t write them to appeal to the male audience. They all act like men & do nothing but act in a terrible way & turn everyone off, because they think they need to be all boss characters, it’s terrible.
I think you're being very generous when you say for every customer they have gained they have driven off ten. It wasn't that long ago that it hit comic sold fifty thousand copies versus the ten or twelve thousand now. Obviously. That question was designed to get a certain response based on the popularity of the movies and a lot of the women who enjoyed the movies enjoyed them because of the attractive men in them. That's literally what women say when asked about the movies.
Around 11:50 you talked about the MCU movies...
What about mothers buying comics for their sons? 😅
A fb poll?
Ppl are strange when you're a stranger....
Sabes DC y Marvel pueden atraer público femenino de verdad dandole lo que quieren DC lo hizo DC vértigo y sobretodo con el universo the Sandman el propio Niel dijo que the Sandman tenía más lectores femeninas de uno alrededor de 70% eran mujeres y tiene sentido ya que lo sobrenatural o fantasía en el género que más consumen una mujer
Ya know, 10 years ago it was probably around 46%, when the dark knight came out every young girl dressed as Harley Quinn, changed their facebook name to include Harley Quinn. Now they dropped off and went to manga or back to barbie and we're stuck with comics for girls and activists
I believe they knew the numbers were "potential" customers and not current comicbook customers, but they got highed on that and pushed in one direction without thinking how it would affect the rest of their fanbase. Even within manga, where the female percentage is higher (probably close to that 50%), females' titles are mostly different from those males read. Marvel and DC are on genre within the comicbook/graphic novel, and like it or not, it is male. Even the european comics, that are not superheroes' genre, it's still 2/3 male. They should've created a couple of titles to lure the female market, or add compelling and well written female characters in group titles. Or if things were good, even open a line more focused on the female readers. All WITHOUT screwing their customer base 😂 the same could be said for all DEI characters and plots. Ive lost all interest in the mutant side of Marvel (except Wolverine and Hickman's P/H of X) and I think it will take years till that changes. Getting close to the same point with Cap.A and Avengers ... Only cool titles that are keeping me are the more horror ones (Ghost Rider, Hulk), Ultimate Spiderman and some mini series from time to time).
That’s why I buy old stuff & indys .
From what I've seen in dozens of comics shops I've been in, the ratio is about 90/10 male/female, and it's stayed the same this whole time. Even with our original live-action videos and comics which feature all female characters, our sales are still overwhelmingly male. The females who want to support our series tend to buy stickers or signed photos. This is as true for us as it is for a series like FemForce, which has been running since the 80s. Denial is nothing more than a river in Egypt.