Maybe Klytus was saying, “Boy, it’s really sad that there’s such a huge female audience for the Avengers, but the comics haven’t been able to capture any of them.” Which is absolutely true. I’m not going to get into question of “How did comics get to this point?”, because lots of blogs have had lots of long, sad conversations about it. But I will ask, “How did comics get to this point without anyone in the industry noticing?” Seriously, the Avengers movie just made a billion dollars. “Billion” with a B billion. That is 100 million tickets sold. Even if you assume that everyone who saw it was a sad obsessive who saw it five times apiece, that is 20 million discrete Avengers fans. Avengers moves about 100,000 copies a month. Not only does this mean they’re reaching one half of one percent of their potential audience, it also happens to be about half the numbers the series did at its peak in the 80s. These are the kinds of numbers that should get an entire building full of people fired, but Marvel actually seems happy with the status quo. At that point, yes, the question “Why aren’t more women reading Avengers?” does need to be asked, along with the questions, “Why aren’t more kids reading Avengers?”, “Why aren’t more men reading Avengers?”, and “Why aren’t more (insert demographic here) reading Avengers?” But it needs to be asked from the perspective, “How can the miserably unsuccessful comics become more like the wildly successful move?” It’s time, in short, to stop assuming that the comics have narrative primacy, simply because they’ve been around longer. Right now, if you asked the average person on the street who the Avengers were, they’d tell you about the movie. We assume the comics are canon and the movies deviate from that canon because that’s how we’ve been following them, but let’s face facts. In terms of monetary success, public recognition, and number of fans, the Avengers are a series of movies that happens to have a lousy and inaccurate spin-off comic where Nick Fury is a white guy
john seavey