Although Marvel was less below average than DC this week, that’s not much to be proud of. It was not a very good week. On April 13, 2011, Marvel had a busy week with 26 new comics made by 225 creators, 207 men and 18 women. The percentages look like this:
The number doesn’t fit in the pie, so you know it’s a bad week. Marvel’s certainly had far worse weeks, but I was feeling so good about the 10.9% they started April with. An 8% was a big step down, and it’s sort of killing my dream of them starting to turn things around. Dammit Marvel… why must you build me up just to let me down?? Let’s take a look at the categories:
And chart them up:
So this is weird. When you break down the numbers, it wasn’t that terrible a week for Marvel, relatively speaking. Pencillers were sort of low, and editors were noticeably lower, but everything else was firmly in the neighbourhood of average. I guess that these two underperformers combined with no standout category to counteract them sunk Marvel this week. Usually, even in bad weeks, there’s one category that makes a strong showing, but not so much here. It’s meh all over, really.
Notes:
- Casanova and S.H.I.E.L.D. both came out this week… if Ozma of Oz had come out too, that would have been Marvel’s three best books in one week!! Or, at least the three I like best.
- We have a three-way tie for the busiest book of the week: Amazing Spider-Man #658, Hawkeye: Blindspot #3, and Ultimate Avengers vs. New Ultimates #3 all had 13 creators, with 2, 1, and 1 female creators respectively.
- The book with the most female creators, percentagewise, were Captain America: Fighting Avenger #1 (with art by the Japanese duo Gurihiru), and Daken: Dark Wolverine #8. Both were 2 of 9.
- To learn more about this statistics project and its methodology click here, and to see the previous stats click here.
TIM HANLEY 