The newest incarnation of the Avangers will be diverse:
“I like the fact that we ended up with an Avengers team with one white guy on it,” said Mark Waid, who will be writing the new Avengers series.
That one white guy will be Tony Stark, also known as Iron Man, a core Avengers member. The new team will also include usual cohorts Thor and Captain America, but not the versions of the characters so many have grown up with. Instead, the female Thor (Jane Foster) and the black Captain America (Sam Wilson, otherwise known as Falcon), who debuted to much controversy last year, will join the crew.
The team will also feature Spider-Man, but not the classic Peter Parker incarnation of the character. Marvel made waves a few days ago when it announced that Miles Morales, a young man of black and Hispanic descent, would be the main Spider-Man in the Marvel universe. Now Morales will also be an Avenger.
The real money in the comic industry is made in the movie arena, and if you look at the Marvel Cinematic Universe — yes, that’s what they call it — it’s 100% White on the current Avengers team’ save for Nick Fury — and Sam Jackson’s fan base is heavily White. It’s actually less diverse than the 1970s version, which sometimes had Falcon or other non-Whites on it.
The comics themselves allow the writers to get their SJW cred, maybe push their agenda onto stupid 14-year-olds, and, in a more practical sense, they think, wrongly, they can expand the market and capture the non-White half of young people. I strongly doubt it. Cultural differences, interest levels in reading, and changes make that media much less popular. Most younger people, including teens, prefer manga or anime anyway, where almost everyone is White or Japanese.
They’ll survive, eking out a living on movie-viewer attention and in specialty bookstores, but they’ll never grow big again, and both Marvel and DC’s money will come from movies.
In most respects, the traditional superhero story is long over, most of the narrative structure makes less sense year by year. As I explained to some younger friends, twentyish geeks, Old Marvel and DC is silly. No one robs banks since its too hard to handle that much cash, newspapers are mostly obsolete, the Italian Mafia is much less powerful, and “real” Batman would be a rich White dude beating up Blacks and Latinos.