Topic: CNSNews.com
It was apparently mandated that since the Media Research Center had a meltdown over Superman being bisexual in a new storyline, someone at its "news" division CNSNews.com had to melt down too. That task fell to Megan Williams, who wrote about it in an Oct. 12 article but focused on purported right-wing backlash:
However, changing America's most beloved heroes has come with its fair share of backlash. The Post Millennial attributed the economic decline of the comic book industry to its attempts to appease the woke culture of the left.
Noting how the comic book industry has been struggling economically since the 1990s, The Post Millennial pointed out that pursuing the values of woke culture has alienated their consumer base.
“The people that buy comics are not woke and never will be. Instead of listening to their consumer base, Marvel was listening to leftist media,” the article reads. “The consumers that buy comics are overwhelmingly white guys in their 30s and 40s.”
The shift of comic book companies to represent the 5.6% of Americans who identify as something other than heterosexual or straight, has made them the most recent victim of the “Get woke, Go broke” mantra, according to The Federalist.
Curiously, Williams refused to identify the partisan right-wing nature of the Post Millennial and the Federalist -- perhaps to hide the fact that the only people making a big deal out of this are right-wingers like herself.
Williams then went on to parrot the Federalist's comparison of the U.S. comic book industry with that of Japan:
The Federalist compared the American comic book companies’ decline to the strength of the Japanese manga industry. The main difference? Japanese manga embraces the traditional values their fans adhere to.
“What gives? Well, first and foremost, the Japanese comic book creators look at their supporters with adoration. In Japan, a culture with a much more conscious sense of respect and hierarchy, if a creator insults anyone or an actor breaks the law, they’re given the boot,” wrote The Federalist.
Attributing Japanese manga success to its reflection of its fans’ values, The Federalist noted how the total sales of the western comics industry amounted to about 10% of the sales for the single most popular Japanese comic book.
But the Japanese manga industry has always been much bigger than the U.S. comics industry -- and manga is now outselling superhero comics in the U.S. It's also worth noting that the best-selling Marvel comic title of this year is ... a Deadpool manga spinoff that's not yet available in the U.S. While the U.S. comics industry is narrowly focused on superheroes, manga has a much more diverse array of subject matter -- including titles targeted at LGBT audiences.
It can also be argued that superhero comics are in trouble not because they've gone "woke" -- it's because they're not woke enough, afraid to lose that sexist-middle-age-white-guy demographic.
It seems that the current trajectory, contrary to the Federalist, is "stay un-woke, go broke." But it seems Williams decided that her education about the comics industry began and ended with uncritically repeating the views of middle-aged right-wingers who are philosophically opposed to being fed anything different -- and certainly not that LGBT people are humans on their level.
