I’m going to be short, sweet and blunt. Dirk Deppy called out a request.
…fangirls want female-friendly superhero comics, they’re going to have to prove that this time an audience is ready and willing to buy them, and to do that, one is basically going to have to be built from scratch.
Spiderman 1, Spiderman 2, Spiderman 3. I believe money talks, and that money says the world is ready for Spiderman. There’s your female fan base Dirk, right there in the cinema audience. Now pony the reason why they shouldn’t be given a quality product that meets their needs since they like the character, and paid the admission price to see the show.
But I’ll go one better, I’ll give you ten good reasons why comic books should ditch the whiny boy brat base and go mainstream
Spider-Man (2002) ($806,700,000) [Marvel]
Spider-Man 2 (2004) ($783,577,893) [Marvel]
The Incredibles (2004) ($624,037,578)
Men in Black (1997) ($587,200,000) [Marvel]
Spider-Man 3 (2007) ($474,829,653) [Marvel]
X-Men: The Last Stand (2006) ($455,260,014) [Marvel]
300 (2006) ($436,723,517) [Dark Horse]
Batman (1989) ($413,200,000) [DC]
X2 (2003) ($406,400,000) [Marvel]
Superman Returns (2006) ($389,569,408) [DC]
Actually, make that USD $5,377,498,063 in cinema revenues worth of reasons for mainstreaming comics. After all…
The problem is that when dealing with business interested in earning a profit, moral arguments have far less weight than economic ones, and the economic argument here is what is driving the product — I choose that word carefully — that shows up in comics-shop shelves.
So why the fuck are Marvel and DC bothering with the pathetic little bottom grazer market of male comic fans? They’re a small little perverted niche that smell bad and hang around tiny little shops that don’t like expanding their market. They whine, they hate new people coming in, and apparently, they buy comics and statues as sex aids.
That’s creepy. Really. Fucking. Creepy.
Dirk thinks that ‘pictures of nekkid chicks and post-coital lesbians sell comic books’. (BTW the word is naked. It’s not that hard to spell). Well, that’s lovely Dirk. How many post-coital lesbians can you spot in Hasbro‘s line up? In fact, Dirk, I have a challenge for you go through the Top 100 IMDB films, and bring me the financial value of the naked women.
Maybe economic rationalisation is what we need the industry might just wise up to the fact that the ‘traditional’ comic book market shares suck when you compare them to the sales from movie licences. After all, there’s no moral argument to support servicing the fanboy market when you put the mass market dollar up against it.
The Spiderman movie franchise opened the door to the Spiderman franchise to a new range of minds, wallets and income. A new set of markets to pour financial support into the industry.
We should be out there welcoming these new arrivals. The people who saw the movie, and wanted more. Instead, newcomers to the Spiderman franchise, potential and would be comic book fans were treated to another round of cliched cheesecake crap when they were looking for the Mary Jane that was portrayed by Kirsten Dunst . The Mary Jane Watson of the $2,065,107,546 Spiderman movie money machine. Instead, they were met with Sideshow’s cheesecake and a bunch of male bloggers complaining. (Oh hai blogger boys, why don’t you just shut with ur whining? If you don’t like an internet with women with opinions, go make ur own BBS clubhouses.)
If this new market of wallets and minds was repelled at the doors by the gatekeeper cheesecake and misogyny, Marvel’s losing market share. So if we want to play economics here, Marvel’s best economic interests are not being served by Sideshow Collectibles if Sideshow is producing material out of touch with the movie going Marvel target audience. They could dump Sideshow Collectibles in heart beat and still afford to fund a new Hulk movie, Captain America, Iron Man, Fantastic Four and a Magento film.
Come to think of it, they are funding a bunch of new films for these markets. Great thing about cinema? Women and men go to the movies. Market shares for women are rather equal to market shares for males. Just imagine how much more money DC, Dark Horse and Marvel could make if they had female readership levels around cinema’s female viewerships? After all, we know that women watch comic book movies. Can’t be that hard to get them to read comic book movie stories.
Unless something was stopping them gee, I wonder what that could be.
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