In April 2017, Marvel Comics vice president of sales David Gabriel told an interviewer that the company’s recent slump was due to its move toward a more diverse roster of characters over the preceding year:
What we heard was that people didn’t want any more diversity. They didn’t want female characters out there. That’s what we heard, whether we believe that or not. I don’t know that that’s really true, but that’s what we saw in sales. We saw the sales of any character that was diverse, any character that was new, our female characters, anything that was not a core Marvel character, people were turning their nose up against. That was difficult for us because we had a lot of fresh, new, exciting ideas that we were trying to get out and nothing new really worked. (Griepp 2017)
After a quick backlash, Gabriel issued a correction. Even so,...
