BlackGeekdom Science-Fiction from a Different Perspective

Comic Book Resources recently did a poll on the where readers were asked to give there favorite characters.   I noticed a couple of interesting things.  DC had one minority (Black Adam) in the entire top 5o, Marvel had 3 ( Storm, Luke Cage, and Black Panther).   If you look at the gender of the characters DC had 7 woman  and Marvel had 11.   What do these number tell us?  Nothing that we didn’t already know.   The race and gender of the characters tend to reflect the fan base  which means its mostly white males.   Which is understandable because most people connect with what’s  familar to them.  This doesn’t mean that only women read Wonder Woman or only African-Americans read Black Panther.   I will step out on a limb and say that both books probably have higher readership in those demographics than most books. 

The point of all this rambling is that the industry needs to diversify its product offering if it wants to survive.   The industry appears to be really healthy because sales are up. This is misleading sales are up because they are squeezing more money out of the same people.   The problem with that strategy is that it only works in the short term. True growth for the industry will come from attracting women and minority readers. In order to get these customers DC and Marvel are going to have to diversify there selection.  Hopefully 10 years from now we will see some different faces in both companies Top 50 lists.

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