Essay 3: Thesis & outline
Shaival Joshi
10/1/2018
English Composition 1 Professor Kalet
Has the comic book industry (print, TV, film) done enough to diversify its characters and/or writers/artists? What should it do moving forward?
Introduction: Diversity has always been a problem in comic industry. There's Not Too Much Diversity in Comic industry. In the early days, minorities were on invisible, and women were usually relegated to romantic interests/damsels in distress. There's been a great deal of debate about the comic industry's handling of diversity in its comics, movies and characters, and a new study indicates how important that issue is to readers and fans.
Like virtually every Comic industry has been increasingly grappling with issues of diversity especially over the last several years as social media and Internet platforms have amplified the voices of minority creators and critics. And in many ways, there's been a sea change. “Diversity of every sort—racial diversity, gender diversity, acknowledging minority sexualities—is experiencing an explosion of recognition and representation in comics.
Marvel’s vice president of sales has blamed declining comic-book sales on the studio’s efforts to increase diversity and female characters, saying that readers “were turning their noses up” at diversity and “didn’t want female characters out there”. Over recent years, Marvel has made efforts to include more diverse and more female characters, introducing new iterations of fan favorites including a female Thor; Riri Williams, a black teenager who took over the Iron Man storyline as Iron heart; Miles Morales, a biracial Spider-Man and Kamala Khan, a Muslim teenage girl who is the current Ms. Marvel.
Declining sale of Comic books or not enough people showed up on comic hero movie the distributors say that, “What we heard was that people didn’t want any more diversity,”. “They didn’t want any character that was diverse, any character that was new, a female character, anything that was not a core Marvel character, people were turning their nose up. My argument to this is I don’t know it is a true statement as people are looking for variation in the comic books and in the comic movies. Different races want to see themselves into those characters. People are tired of watching the same superhero every year so I am not agreed that Marvel’s claim about people are tired of diversity.
We really need a diversity to save a comic industry as there is not much done to do so. There’s no question about it: Straight white men dominate comic books, both on and off the page. They write and illustrate the majority of titles, and those books tend to star straight white male protagonists, especially in the superh...
