No wonder comic books suck.

With management like this, no wonder Marvel Comics suck.

Marvel's vice president of sales has blamed declining comic-book sales on the studio's efforts to increase diversity and female characters, saying that readers "were turning their noses up" at diversity and "didn't want female characters out there".

Over recent years, Marvel has made efforts to include more diverse and more female characters, introducing new iterations of fan favourites including a female Thor; Riri Williams, a black teenager who took over the Iron Man storyline as Ironheart; Miles Morales, a biracial Spider-Man and Kamala Khan, a Muslim teenage girl who is the current Ms Marvel.

But speaking at the Marvel retailer summit about the studio's falling comic sales since October, David Gabriel told ICv2 that retailers had told him that fans were sticking to old favourites. "What we heard was that people didn't want any more diversity," he said. "They didn't want female characters out there. That's what we heard, whether we believe that or not."

He added: "I don't know that that's really true, but that's what we saw in sales … Any character that was diverse, any character that was new, our female characters, anything that was not a core Marvel character, people were turning their nose up."

This is a guy who makes decisions on what gets the green light at Marvel Comics. Sales are down because our customers are racist/bigot/homophobe nerds who should all be ashamed of themselves!

I hate to tell you buddy, you lost me back in 1993 before Northstar was gay.

Let's consider where Marvel has been lately:

Thor is a chick.

Peter Parker is dead, Spiderman is some other kid now.

Captain America was dead, then he was some black dude fighting -against- America, and now he's alive again, but he's a Nazi.

Wolverine is a broken old man dying of something, Professor X is an incontinent demented geezer who killed all the X-Men by accident, America is Hell and Canada is The Promised Land. (Seriously, have any of you hipsters ever even BEEN to Canada? Or out of Manhattan?)

Johnny Storm is a black kid with a white sister, and Mr. Fantastic is a cowardly dickhead. Sadly, the Johnny Storm thing was not dumbest thing about that movie.

Tony Stark is either dead or in detox, Iron Man is a black chick with big hair.

Various minor superheros who were straight are now gay as their single most defining characteristic.

That's not "diversity." That is imaginational bankruptcy. (Imaginational is totally a word.)

I do not want to pay three or four dollars for a ten-page comic that is mostly full page panels of blood spatter and advertising. I want to read Peter Parker, the Amazing Spiderman vs Villain Guy. I do NOT want to read "Peter Parker transitioning to female," or "Peter Parker dies horribly and some random scrub takes over for him. Then dies horribly."

I am not going to collect twenty different universes, most of which only exist so that big name characters can be gay, or chicks, or gay chicks, or some other fucked-up combination.

Stan Lee and those old geezers in wheelchairs started with a simple concept. What if Spiderman was a real kid, who really lived in NYC? What would happen? Then they ran with it. That's what made Marvel awesome, and I suggest if you want your sales to climb back up out of the toilet, you get back to it ASAP.

So, if you want to have a gay black girl with big hair in a wheelchair be an armored crime fighter, I might be up for that.  As long as the thing isn't one long boring sermon about how much America sucks.

Making her Iron Man? Nope. Not going to read it. Tony Stark is Iron Man, Peter Parker is Spider Man, Thor is the SON of Odin, Johnny Storm is a smart alec blond kid, and Colossus is a straight Russian dude with a Boris Badenov accent you can spread on toast. How fucked is it that the best X-Man movie so far is fricking Deadpool?

The Phantom