Statistics from Comics Beat have shown that 47 percent of comic book readers are female, and Marvel is getting ready to appeal to that rising demographic. The company’s popular Avengers comic series will be coming to an end this summer sometime during their highly-anticipated Secret Wars storyline, and the team of superheroes will be replaced by the all-female A-Force.
The A-Force will unite female characters from across the Marvel universe, after the peaceful feminist utopia Arcadia comes under attack in the wake of the Secret Wars. According to Marvel, popular female superheroes such as Dazzler, Medusa and She-Hulk will all be featured in the series, as will a new character named Singularity, a “cosmological event that has become self-aware.” The full line-up of A-Force heroines will be revealed on The View on Monday.
“I think an announcement like this is not as shocking as it would have been a couple of years ago,” said Ms. Marvel writer G. Willow Wilson of the upcoming series, which she will pen with Angela: Asgard’s Assassin‘s Marguerite Bennet. “It used to be that a character like Ms. Marvel would have been the trifecta of death. It was a new character, a female character and a minority character headlining her own book. Traditionally, none of those things sell. But it did.”
Willow stated that she and the other minds behind The A-Force are all very excited “to be on the cutting edge” of new comic book trends, adding that “nobody wants to be left behind.”
Marvel has been making major strides in trying to fulfill it’s mission to start resembling “the world outside your window” over the past five years, promoting female Muslim hero Ms. Marvel, an all-female X-Men team, and a female Thor. The studio also announced that feminist pilot Captain Marvel will join their cinematic universe in 2017. The A-Force will be fifteenth female-led comic book series for Marvel, and thus far, their attempts to appeal to female readers has paid off in major ways. The first comic featuring the female Thor had over 200,000 orders, Spider-Gwen No. 1 has over 250,000 orders, and the collected edition of Ms. Marvel Vol. 1 was a New York Times bestseller.
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