Anonymous
asked:
hi Tom - As a comics professional, do you see any useful distinction between “comic fans who are broadly interested in the medium (to whatever degree) and for whom superheroes are only one part of a larger comic diet” and “Marvel continuity fans”? Obviously these groups are not mutually exclusive and of course Marvel wants them both. I had a longer version of this question that word count cut off, so let’s just pretend I was elegant and non-divisive here. Thoughts on this?
Not really, no. I favor a pretty equal playing field: anybody who has the cover price of one of our comics is equal in my eyes. The distinctions tend to come down to what sort of material they like and perhaps how much of it they consume. But trying to narrow-cast towards that core long-time Marvel audience tends to not be a strategy for long-term success. It’s not a community that’s only of one mind and one set of tastes even among itself, but the stuff it sometimes tend to react the best to is material that’s almost actively exclusionary to other people–material that’s about rewarding the time and money they’ve spent reading comics for however many years.