I collected comics big time a s a kid until like my first year in college. Used to go to the conventions (when they were only about the comic books), I visited my fave comic book store on a weekly basis and then I started at that very store as my first job. This was in the DC region of the country, pretty diverse. I saw all sorts of people at these places Women were a CLEAR minority at any of those locations. Not absent mind you. And some were even hardcore fans. But at the most they made up less than 10% of the people hanging around and half of those were the girlfriends/wives who were accompanying their significant others. And those women were almost exclusively white, with some black and Asian girls thrown in here and there. Did my experience represent a perfect representation of who were comic book fans? Most likely not. And, hey, I had two sisters and a black female friend of the family who were into comic books so I know there were black girls who were into the stuff. But the way women in general talk on social media these days you would think women made up half of the buyers. Now granted I haven't really been into the industry all that much and I'm certain the number of female enthusiasts have grown. Used to hear that they were the primary buyers of anime comics in America and they probably do make up a large chunk of the less mainstream/non-superhero comics. However I'm certain women remain in the clear minority so far as being comic book buyers.
This is why even as a black man and a certified left-leaning Democrat I am fatigued with the nonsense about diversity and representation that i come across on left-leaning blogs, websites, twitter accounts. People practically screaming for race-bending casting in films and TV shows, willing to trow out decades of established character specifications in order to feel wanted. The vast majority of these folks never touched a comic book in their fucking lives but act as if they are fatigued over all the years of waiting for more inclusiveness among comic book characters. As a result as soon as a character undergoes an ethnic, racial or gender change in the comic book which they hear about, they pounce on that as if that should be the rule of law for TV or movie versions of that character. So, say, if there is talk about Catwoman making an appearance in an upcoming movie these folks demand that a Hispanic actress be chosen for the part because the latest version of Catwoman in DC comics s of Cuban ancestry. Fuck that. She has been Cuban for all of five minutes so if they cast a white actress I would be more than fine with it. But the advocates of diversity would strongly disagree. On the other hand Iris West has remained white in every reboot of The Flash but the diversity advocates (in this case black women and their black male dupes) insist that a back actress must forever play Iris West because one played her on the Flash TV show. When news of development of Flash movie became widespread these folks came up with a hashtag #KeepIrisBlack which went viral. That was so stupids considering Iris has always been white so in theory one could have easily countered with #MakeIrisWhiteAgain or #KeepIrisWhite. But of course there is rarely any pushback. It didn't really matter at first because the hired directors for the Flash had a white actress in mind. But they left the film to make the Han Solo film (and got fired from that). Warner Bros hired the black director for "Dope" as a replacement and I knew what was coming. He hired a black actress from "Dope" for the role of Iris, he actually was favoring her from the very beginning. Creative differences with the studio led to him leaving Flash as well, but his choice of Iris remains.
I won't sugarcoat it. The comic book industry is steeped in tradition and racism. It is also a dying with its main hope of relevance coming from screen adaptations of its properties. To better fit an increasingly diverse body of potential new consumers it needed to diversify its material by bringing in more female writers, more people of color and by creating more diverse characters (and I DON'T mean making black or Latino or female versions of already established white male characters). Instead the comic book industry has mostly kept a status quo by only giving buyers a half-hearted attempt at diversity. Meanwhile the film versions create diversity by race-bending in its casting, giving the impression to non-comic book consumers that the overall collective of comic book characters are racially varied than it actually is.
