fuckyeahshulkie:

“It’s not as if women some sort of mysterious homing pigeon hormones that allow us to swarm the best in lady culture when it’s published even if no one lets us know about it. I’d be genuinely curious to know if Marvel and DC have done substantial advertising campaigns in women’s magazines, or on female-oriented television shows when they’re rolling out new storylines or new artists on comics with female characters? Or if they’ve pitched their comics characters as cover girls or interview subjects a la Marge Simpson’s Playboy spread? Just for fun, I checked the Cosmopolitan and Marie Claire archives for references to She-Hulk, Ms. Marvel, the Scarlet Witch, Catwoman, Wonder Woman. Only the last produced any results actually related to comics or related products: in a guide to famous breasts in Marie Claire that misstates Wonder Woman’s history. If any other industry was making a push to get a product to its core audience and was failing that miserably in reaching them, they would fire their PR people and their marketing department. Maybe someone can offer information I don’t have here, and if so, I’d be curious to hear it. You can’t expect women to go into comic book stores if they have no idea that anything’s there for them. You can’t expect them to swing by comics and graphic novels sections in physical or online bookstores if they have no conception that there are characters they should get excited about. If you really want a female audience, go after it.”

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Alyssa Rosenberg on the issue of why, perhaps, Marvel & DC can’t sustain success with female audiences to the point that they’ll continue to publish titles they’d want to read. She mentions Dan Slott’s fantastic She-Hulk run and that maybe it didn’t have better success because women didn’t know about it. Quoted for truth. Please reblog for truth. (via thebirdandthebat)

Whenever people discuss the Big Two’s complete failure to draw readers to their female-led/female-friendly titles, I always think of Spider-Girl, which at exactly 100 issues (before relaunch under a new title) was probably Marvel’s most successful title with a solo female lead since Patsy Walker and Millie the Model, both of which technically predated Marvel itself. Though Spider-Girl never made a lot of sales in pamphlets, it did quite well in the direct market largely because its small but devoted fanbase did Marvel’s work for them. They bought multiple copies of issues to give to young girls they knew, they called big box retailers and asked them to stock the series in their graphic novel section. It was the little series that could.

Unfortunately it was also the series with a married Peter and Mary Jane Parker written by a former Editor-in-Chief, so rather than Marvel taking note and giving the title a real push in the market it was successful in, the title was cancelled. Then Araña was made Spider-Girl, and despite a big publicity push was also not marketed towards a young girl audience, and now that that title’s been cancelled too we have no Spider-Girls at all.