It was a VERY busy week at Marvel, and a bad one as well, which is a double whammy. It’s always more bearable when the bad weeks are slow. On May 18, 2011, Marvel released 25 new books with 224 credited creators, 210 men and 14 women. The percentages are not so good:
And I rounded up even… it’s actually 93.75% and 6.25%, but if I rounded them both up (as you do with fives) it wouldn’t add up properly, so I gave the round up to the ladies, not that it helped a lot. This 6.3% ties DC’s record for the worst week of 2011, which is a bummer. May might suck for Marvel, you guys. And they’ve been doing so well so far this year, improving every month. We’ll have to wait for next week to be sure, but it’s not looking good. The categories break down thusly:
And chart up like this:
When DC had 6.3%, there were FIVE categories with zeroes. But here, Marvel is just sucking across the board with limited representation everywhere. To be fair, writers and pencillers aren’t awful, and assistant editors are a little below average but not too badly so. However, cover artists are WAY down, and there was only ONE female editor!! This is an astoundingly low editorial total… plus, editorial usually picks up some of the slack for the other categories. Colourists often do the same, but they’re in single digits this week. It’s weird to have a little something everywhere… the publishers are very different, with Marvel having lower totals but more distribution but DC having higher totals with more concentrated categories. Is either better, or are they both equally bad scenes in different ways? It’s hard to say.
Notes
- The bulk of the credits I get come from the Grand Comics Database, but this week the Comic Collector Connect Database came through with an issue I couldn’t find anywhere else, and I very much appreciate them doing so.
- The busiest book of the week was Amazing Spider-Man #661 with 14 creators… again, assistant editor Ellie Pyle is the only gal. Amazing Spider-Man won last week though (it comes out a few times a month), so let’s put up the second highest: Ultimate Avengers vs. New Avengers #4 with 13 creators, 1 a woman.
- The book with the most female creators, percentagewise and numerically, was X-23 #10 at 3 of 6. That’s a pretty good number!! Hooray for Marjorie Liu, Sana Takeda (pencilling, inking, AND colouring… she counts for a full THIRD of the creative credits by category), and Jeanine Schaefer!!
- To learn more about this statistics project and its methodology click here, and to see the previous stats click here.
Tags: Marvel, Women In Comics Statistics
