Category Archives: Rants

Women made up 23% of DC’s online readership survey (but DC thinks 7% is more accurate)

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DC is having a “you can’t handle the truth!” moment. In the face of conflicting survey results, they dismissed their online survey because it revealed a much larger percentage of female readers than the in-store and digital samplings.

In a Publishers Weekly interview with DC’s Vice-President of Sales and Marketing John Rood, The Beat’s Heidi MacDonald asks some hard questions that reveal some very interesting answers.

The survey was released in three different forms. In the online survey 77% of respondents were male and 23% were female. That sounds a lot more accurate than the 93 % / 7% breakdown of the statistically meaningless in-store and invite-only digital reader surveys (seriously: meaningless). Yet DC chose to publicize ONLY the 93/7 number because they believed them to be more “accurate”. When faced with large numbers of women they couldn’t ignore, they literally wrote us out of the press release.

Publishers Weekly: DC’s Rood Breaks Down Reader Survey

John Rood: The in-store and the online exclusively —group 1 and group 3—those were both 93-7 in male/female skew. The middle survey, online only which was open to any self-identified shopper, was 77-23 male/female. So was there a glut of activity specific to wanting to register certain feedback? I can’t say whether females found their voice in that survey or whether they had specific female related issues to report on, but this is something that stood out.

Notice how Rood automatically assumes the online survey is the “skewed” one, rather than questioning whether the in-store survey that only took place on Wednesdays in September is all that representative. DC just can’t wrap their minds around the idea that female readers make up a large percentage of their readers.

Rood is correct in that women have a lot more incentive to make our voices heard than male fans — DC constantly ignores and belittles our existence. Rather than dismiss the online survey results out of hand (which they did when they initially publicized “93/7″), they could have questioned the other surveys which resulted in such an extreme skew.

Many more people responded to the online survey in part because it was the only one they heard about. One commenter only participated because she heard about the online survey from the female-focused DCWKA site — she was never told about it by her comic shop.

To me one of the biggest issues DC has had with the whole campaign has been the lack of a forward facing PR and advertising person who understood the ability to focus to audiences on a large spectrum. I took part on the survey because I found the link information through here, it wasn’t supplied by my comic shop.

- SilverLocust @ DC Women Kicking Ass

DC doesn’t know we exist because the industry doesn’t consider us in the first place. They’re so surprised by our high participation in an online survey that they chalk it up to a sex-driven mobilization focusing on so-called “special” interests, rather than realizing that, hey, it’s 2012 and the internet is a widespread mode of communication that’s far more effective than sampling comic shops which the majority of people don’t even know exist. Rood even noted that both the in-store and online surveys drew a high percentage of self-identified “avid” readers, in contrast to the digital survey, so again, why so quick to dismiss the online survey as less valid?

So those who identified as female and took the survey online voluntarily were three times higher than those who took in a store.

And as for the question around “why?”, another question could be, “are women not buying their comics through the direct market? Are they getting their comics in other ways? Mail order? Were the shops we selected diverse enough?”

- DC Women Kicking Ass: DC Comics’ John Rood on those Survey numbers

Many people only go into a comic store every few weeks to pick up their pull list of comics. (I seldom went on release day because I wanted to avoid a crowd.) By only polling on Wednesdays, DC guaranteed a large percentage of “avid” readers.

John Rood on the study’s accuracy:

Publishers Weekly: One of the things people noted right away was that only 5% of the survey was new readers. Were you surprised? Do you think it’s low or high? Are you satisfied?

John Rood: I think the study is not indicative of the actual system wide performance, in light of the fact that I would imagine that avid fans are more apt to participate in a survey in the first place than a new fan, whether that survey is through the in-store recruiting, or the website that was solicited to the in-store and digital shoppers, and the digital buyer list we targeted specifically. Of those three samples I think you would get greater compliance from passionate ones. I don’t think that 5% is an absolute. I think it’s interesting that self-identified new fans were right at 4-5% regardless of the three samples. It was very consistent.

- Publishers Weekly: DC’s Rood Breaks Down Reader Survey.

Rood calls this a “hastily gathered survey and relatively short survey time” which kept them from “getting a better sense of individual intent, history and change in behavior”. At the end of the interview he says that DC will be doing another survey in 2012 “for sure”. That’s good to hear.

Read further:

DC Execs Want Everyone To Read Their Books: Just Not Women, Children, Teens, or Anyone Over 34

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DC Senior VP Sales, Bob Wayne, was in his home turf yesterday, as DC Comics took a road trip to Dallas to talk to retailers about the upcoming relaunch.

At the show, DC told retailers that they have a seven figure marketing budget to spend on the Relaunch, which includes everything from the previously Bleeding Cooled TV ad campaign, including the Cartoon Network ads to USA Today, Facebook, movie theaters ads, conventions and promotional materials. The target audience are men age 18 to 34 though they do realize that they have readers in other demographics.

They do realize that they have readers in other demographics. They just don’t want us. Even though we make up the majority of the population and would make for fiercely loyal readers.

They only want more of the same demographic they’ve been trying and failing to attract for years. They want “new readers” but only certain kinds of readers. The kind that wants Harley Quinn stripped of her clothing and recast as a “death-row super villain”, apparently.

Continue reading “DC Execs Want Everyone To Read Their Books: Just Not Women, Children, Teens, or Anyone Over 34” »

My Barbara Gordon Rant

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In a perfect world, we wouldn’t have to choose between Barbara Gordon as Batgirl and computer hacker extraordinaire Oracle, mentor to the next generation of Gotham’s female heroes. In a perfect world, DC would never have allowed such a misogynistic storyline as The Killing Joke to see the light of day, let alone become canon. In a perfect world they would have multiple disabled characters who rocked as hard as Oracle, multiple female characters as powerful, brilliant, charismatic and just plain awesome as Babs as both Batgirl and Oracle. We wouldn’t have just one woman embodying all that, we’d have many. Just like there are many variations on amazing male characters (and I don’t just mean the boggling variations on bat men that get to be Robin, Nightwing, and even Batman himself at various times). But we only have one Barbara Gordon, and is she, and female readers, really best served by regressing her to an earlier time at the expense of her entire adult life from that point AND at the expense of the very existence of Cass, Steph, Wendy and Misfit? All the while kicking real disabled readers in the teeth by taking away the most prominent disabled character and saying “you can’t have her, she belongs to the fanboys who long for the young girl from the 1970s”? Astonishingly, somebody powerful at DC actually thinks the answer to that question is “yes”.

Undoing Barbara’s disability will not fix the misogynistic choice by DC’s PTB that led to the development of Oracle (by some very different, very wonderful writers, let’s not forget). And you know what, DC needs to live with that decision, every single day. Just like women live with the effects of men’s violence against them every. single. day. Barbara overcame and became stronger than we possibly could have imagined. Maybe that’s not the heroine some men at DC want to be on their roster. Maybe they should grow up.

(Okay, so I did have a rant about this after all. But Jill Pantozi’s OP-ED on Newsarama is much better, so please do read that if you haven’t already. And if that doesn’t convince you, try this piece on the legacy of Barbara Gordon that was published last month.)

Reblogged: DC’s bullshit “commitment to diversity”

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Emma of Girls Read Comics Too speaks on a subject important to me: DC’s continued failure to fix its diversity problem. What’s the point of a relaunch if they don’t make major strides on this?

It is, and I’m fairly sure for a number of reasons that DC editorial isn’t aware of this, 2011. One black guy and a white chick on a team full of The Dead White Guys That Time Forgot [re: the JLA #1 cover] is not diversity, especially since basically all those dead white guys were brought back by killing off their non-white successors. I mean seriously, the original crew of the USS Enterprise was more diverse than Geoff Johns’ newly unveiled JLA. Actual diversity was Dwayne McDuffie’s monumentally unpopular JLA. I can’t even fathom how DC can claim any kind of commitment to diversity when- shortly after Static and Blue Beetle were unceremoniously dumped from Teen Titans to preserve it’s untainted whiteness- the Static ongoing withered on the vine without seeing a single issue in print.

The actual truth of the matter is that any steps towards true and honest diversity at DC have come from the efforts of specific writers and had nothing to do with editorial policy or initiatives, because really editorial can’t even seem to manage to keep the artists and colourists depicting the few POC characters DC actually has as their actual race. Until the long delayed Batwoman ongoing launches in the fall (which it seems has been held back so long in part because editorial keeps pulling co writer and co artist JH Williams III off the book to make variant covers for Batman Inc), there won’t be a single title at DC headlined by a (canonically recognized) queer character and the only non-white title character I can think of off the top of my head is Damian Wayne who I’m pretty sure most of the fandom read as white (say nothing about Dick Grayson’s ignored and erased Romani heritage).

[Snipping a bit]

The crowning achievement of Batman RIP, The Return of Bruce Wayne, and Batman Inc. was to decenter both Bruce Wayne and Gotham City in the Batman mythos to give fresh license and agency to the full roster of Bat characters. Which not only contributed to the much needed return of Stephanie Brown and Cassandra Cain, but to the widening scope of the Batman Inc. initiative that has already given us David Hine’s Nightrunner who is not only a fantastic character in his own right, but a template for modern, progressive storytelling. The path forward for DC has been paved by the Gotham/Bat centric titles since the launch of Gotham Central. Move the focus away from the same eight white guys, diversify the cast organically with well researched and respectful portrayals of non white/hetero-normative characters, and continuously plow forward instead of walking backwards with your eyes fixed on your own navel, which is precisely what this reboot is shaping up to be.

Source: Girls Read Comics Too: DC Reboots, we react!

How not to respond to criticisms of race and gender

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June 5, 2010: DC Nation panel at Heroes Con 2010

A serious topic came up about how characters who are minorities who happened to be legacy characters like Ryan Choi are killed off so their caucasian counterparts can return and how they feel like they are being cheated or sidelined out of their roles. Sattler took a more serious tone. “It’s so hard for me to be on the other side because it’s not our intention. There is a reason behind it all. We don’t see it that way and strive very hard to have a diverse DCU. I mean, we have green, pink, and blue characters. We have the Great Ten out there and I have counter statistics, but I won’t get into that. It’s not how we perceived it. We get the same thing about how we treat our female characters.”
– Ian Settler, DC Senior Story Editor

Not kidding. He really mocked real people of colour by talking not about them but about non-existent green, pink, and blue people!!!!

And then cited the horrifically offensive Chinese superhero team “The Great Ten” to add insult to injury. Oh, and some hypothetical “counter statistics” that he “won’t get into”.

There is so much wrong going on here. You must read Brown Betty’s breakdown in DC Comics: eliminating non-buyer’s remorse:

But I am also boggling at using The Great Ten in their defence. Technically, it could be worse. He could have pointed out Egg Fu, but The Great Ten is not so great either. Here are some quotes by Morrison and Bedard, on one of the Great Ten, Mother of Champions: These quotes from this Newsarama article, emphasis mine:

“Mother of Champions is a rather hair-raising concept,” Bedard explained. “She can give birth to, as Grant Morrison put it, ‘a 25-strong litter of genetically-identical supermen, each with a lifespan of one week.”

The racism inherent in a Chinese character whose power is her terrifying fertility should be apparent, but litter makes me so mad I can’t even. Sows have litters. Dogs have litters. Women have BABIES, you unbelievable piece of shit.
– Brown Betty

And also Odditycollector’s post What the shit is this on my computer screen? which has some awesome comments over on livejournal and dreamwidth.

Incidentally, I like how the spokesman used his dismissive Invoking Strangely Colored People tactic as a segue to wave off any of the icky shrill feminists in the audience/readerbase as well. “So this one thing you guys complain about? Nope. Just no. Also this other thing, that’s a no too. You’re wrong.”
– Vejiicakes

Yeah… I’m still not sure how to read that. Is it “And as analogy, our comics are full of gender! Just for instance, look at all the men! Thus the feminists who complain about lack of gender inclusion are *dumb*!”

Or is it “You know who else whines about stuff? FEMINISTS. You people complaining about the CoC situation don’t want to be like FEMINISTS, do you?”
– Odditycollector

War of the Supermen #1-3

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This miniseries should have been called “The Big Giant Status Quo Reset”, or, “Everyone and everything you liked about New Krypton gets destroyed, but Luthor lives.”

I’ve moved past my denial about them killing Alura and the (soon to be) entire population of New Krypton and into a kind of numb acceptance. With that comes a profound disinterest in the disappointing resolution to what promised to be a bold, exciting new chapter in Superman and Supergirl comics. I started buying SUPERGIRL again when Sterling Gates came on board at the same time as New Krypton, and I am depressed at the thought of returning to pre-New Krypton Supergirl after being given a taste of something so much bigger. I even bought a comic starring Superman for a whole year, and the comic version of Superman generally bores me (they then proceeded to make WORLD OF NEW KRYPTON all about Supes and Zod’s manly pissing contest, so look who’s the sucker!).

My guess is that anyone created for New Krypton will be killed or returned to status quo by the end of WAR OF THE SUPERMAN #4. Zod and Ursa will live (Non might die for angst). Luthor not only lives, but will get a starring role in the Superman comics, because that’s something fresh and interesting that people want to see *sarcasm* Brainiac is spirited off to R.E.B.E.L.S. General Lane will live. DC villains are sacred and can never be killed off if they’ve been around since the Silver Age, no matter how overused they’ve become or implausible it is that they’re still around. I doubt Lucy will be killed, but she probably won’t remain Superwoman much longer. Nightwing, it’s hard to say, given that he showed up earlier. If they don’t kill after Thara sacrificed herself, it’ll look bad politically. But if they do, there’s that whole child-killing problem again. Then again, they never addressed the hugely problematic and creepy situation of Thara having a physically romantic relationship with a child so that won’t come up.

In the weekly Newsarama interviews with James Robinson and Sterling Gates (Week 1, Week 2, Week 3) Gates stated that

I’ve heard from people who are really upset that New Krypton was destroyed, that a planet with such potential was blown up, its inhabitants killed. I agree; it’s a traumatizing and polarizing event.

But that’s what we’re saying with it: Death and destruction don’t care about potential.

Comparing the waste of storytelling potential to the wasted potential of human life in actual war is a bit out of proportion. Fans have a legitimate beef here. DC publishes serialized stories that go on forever, generally of uneven quality and at a price not conducive to impulse buying. New Krypton was their meal ticket to years of potentially rich stories to mine and they threw it all away for nothing. That’s the potential of the planet they blew up. After the underwhelming stories that did get told in SUPERMAN, ACTION COMICS, and WoNK, I’m even more angry about wasted potential.

The completely awful waste of Mon-El this past year (I dropped the book after they outright told us *in the book* that his year-long run would be all for naught). The thing with the evil gorilla scientist was completely unnecessary and unwanted. The Flamebird and Nightwing book went places it shouldn’t have with their own run-in with an evil scientist, and they never addressed the child-in-a-man’s body issue. Add to that the resolution of the Project 7734 backup in SUPERMAN (I think?), and there was too much torture going on.

I don’t want to think about the years of great storylines that could have come from New Krypton. I don’t want to think about how grateful I was that Alura was finally a relevant and vital character who had an important, complex relationship with her daughter. I don’t want to think about how happy I was that Alura and Kara appeared to have healed their relationship, and my mistake in thinking that the two of them were about to take charge of the war and turn it all around in a rare example of intergenerational female butt-kicking. I don’t want to think about how Alura’s legacy is using her daughter to get to Reactron to torture him. I don’t want to think about how I won’t get to experience a new era of Supergirl comics where she learns and grows through her relationships on new Kandor, trying to fit into their wacky caste-based society, with her mother as their leader.

The return of Krypton and Kara’s renewed relationship with her mother were the best thing to happen to Supergirl. But I don’t for a second think that most of the men at DC grasp the importance of Alura. They don’t live in a world where adventure stories about fathers and sons just don’t exist. They had to kill off Zor-El to do it, but for a brief time they actually gave us a story where a mother was the powerful leader of an entire goddamned planet of superbeings and her daughter was a superhero. That’s too fucking awesome to be tossed aside for some lame-o story called “War of the SuperMEN”.

“War” seldom makes for an interesting story in superhero comics, which have long since pumped that well dry. Shock and awe aren’t actually all that interesting once the shock wears off, so “crisis” stories are seldom worth revisiting. I won’t be doing individual reviews of these issues because I can’t come up with anything interesting to say about a series of fight scenes beyond, “Lots of people die. I’m sad.”

I’d much rather be able to talk about New Krypton in the future as a backdrop to the super books, one which added to the richness of the mythos without overwhelming it. I never expected New Krypton to remain the focus in all four books, but it gave them something different (if not entirely original) to work with which they really needed. Instead they chose to return to the status quo, again.

I haven’t read WotS #4 yet, so no spoilers in the comments please!