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David Gabriel Hated The Marvel Essential Line – But Loves A 40% Female Audience

919k5DDNNPLBack in 2014, we re-reported a story that Marvel was ending its Essential line of collections, big fat black-and-white collections of older Marvel comics titles for very little money.

At the time Marvel SVP David Gabriel got in touch to say that he was misquoted and that he hasn;t said the line was being cancelled.

But it was being cancelled. And Marvel liquidated their backstock. Naturally certain volumes became collectibles as a result, such as the first volume of Thor selling for over $600 on Amazon.

Anyway, it turns out that Gabriel's antipathy for the Essential volume format was more extreme than we thought, telling ICV2,

We used to do those Essentials that I hated, so we have the artwork, 'we should just start doing coloring books.'  Everyone in the office sort of giggled about it, thinking 'that's not a thing,' and eight months later, you see how many other comic publishers are doing it.

thor1But talking of Thor, he also sees the Jane Foster version of the character who has taken the lead in that series for the last few years as being a real moment of change for the publisher.

To me, the paradigm shift started for us when we brought in the female Thor, because that horrified and supposedly alienated the people you're talking about, but it also certainly rejuvenated that character and that book and made it one of our bestselling books.

And how the audience has changed.

From things that we gather from some analysis that Disney does on who is buying Marvel as a brand, and from talking to retailers and looking at our titles, we're probably up to at least 40% female, which eight years ago might have been 10%.  And 15 years ago might have been nothing, while they were all buying manga.  So there's really been a shift, which is great, and it even could be even higher than 40%. I'm sure if you go into some retail shops in different parts of the country, that'll be 50-60% female, and some lower.  But that's about what we're seeing now.

Invincible Iron Man bAnd he expects similar from Riri Williams in Iron Man.

People are outraged.  People are sending death threats to [Brian Michael] Bendis, which is sad.  But at the same time we're getting things from moms who say, "My daughter was in tears when she read this because now she has a superhero that she loves from the movies that she can actually aspire to."

He also announces a big Star Wars box set collection of the comic book adaptation of the seven movies, and Infinity Gauntlet to follow.

Three years ago we launched a $500 box set of Masterworks, reprinting the original run.  We followed that up with the Secret Wars run, followed by Civil Warin its entirety.  For next year, we'll be doing a Star Wars.  It won't be quite $500 because there wasn't so much material to put in there.  It'll be all the movie adaptations that have been done over the years up through Force Awakens.  So that will all be collected.  I'm sure we'll be doing something with Infinity Gauntlet after that.

He also says,

We had a great June and yet people try to change the market share reports to report how we actually lost the June market share because they were figuring out other ways to calculate it.  That was a new one for us.

I think that was me. It's nice to be noticed..


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Rich JohnstonAbout Rich Johnston

Founder of Bleeding Cool. The longest-serving digital news reporter in the world, since 1992. Author of The Flying Friar, Holed Up, The Avengefuls, Doctor Who: Room With A Deja Vu, The Many Murders Of Miss Cranbourne, Chase Variant. Lives in South-West London, works from Blacks on Dean Street, shops at Piranha Comics. Father of two. Political cartoonist.
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