Post by Lord Death Man on Jul 31, 2019 18:47:03 GMT

I worked in a comic book store during the era when Kamala Khan's Ms. Marvel was introduced. Those books sold well. If I recall correctly, they sold so well that Marvel was eager to repeat the experiment, which is why they introduced female Thor in the first place. The Khan character's books frequently exceeded Marvel's sales projections (which granted were usually very conservative). I'm certainly not calling you a liar but, I often hear that sales were terrible on those books without much in the way of sourcing.
The way I remember it from the retail perspective is that not only were the books selling reasonably well, but they were also attracting a new audience. Marvel was desperate to get new readers into the comic books as older readers were aging out and sales were slipping dramatically. I can attest to this personally.
Jason Aaron's run on Thor, Unworthy Thor, and Mighty Thor were by all account successful critically and financially.
Where I worked, we had a crop of regulars who insisted they would not buy Marvel books anymore if the diversity trend continued. This put pressure on my boss, and he joined a coalition of retailers who took their concerns to the distributors (who in turn pushed back on Marvel). Ironically, a lot of the older regulars had sub-lists that had shrunk more than 2/3 before the diversity trend even started. Many long-time big-two readers, suffering from "event fatigue," started switching to highly praised indies as their goto books.
I'm not saying every diversity-themed book Marvel put out during that era was a hit. A lot of them bombed hard (A-Force, I'm looking at you), but, the entire experiment was far from a complete failure critically or financially.

