A couple of years ago, DC Comics had this great idea of rebooting Superman as a climate change-fighting bisexual. So brave! So inclusive! So not what comic readers actually want.
It turns out that making Superman LGBTQ was kryptonite to sales. Despite an initial surge of sales from virtue-signaling LGBTQ activists and allies, interest tapered off so quickly that the bisexual Superman comic series was canceled due to a lack of sales.
Naturally, DC Comics took the lesson to heart, realizing that making Superman a bisexual social justice warrior wasn’t the key. So instead they decided to try again with Green Lantern. But this time, they’d make him gay, not bisexual because obviously that would fix everything.
And it didn’t. Comic book readers utterly rejected "Alan Scott: Green Lantern."
That’s not to say that its creators didn’t try to make it a success by appealing to the LGBTQ community and its virtue-signaling allies to not only buy the book but also buy multiple copies to inflate its sales.
“I’m here to ask you a favor. The book comes out next DC Tuesday, October 24th, but already the haters and the queerphobes are out in force, doing everything they can to see that this book tanks. They use code and make it sound like they have legit problems with a book they haven’t read yet. But the truth is they just don’t like that there is a queer hero in the upper ranks of the DCU,” writer Tim Sheridan said in a post on X/Twitter.
“The only way we can shut these people down is to make this book an undeniable success,” he continued. “The only way to prove to the big publishers that there’s a huge market for authentic stories about LGBTQIA+ characters and these stories are for everyone is to buy the heck out of books like this.”
According to Bounding Into Comics, the gay Green Lantern comic "failed to break into the top 50 most sold comic books by units list. It also failed to break into the top 50 most sold comic books by dollars list."
Related: Archie Comics to Introduce Transgender Character
“It’s not in the top 50. So if it’s not in the top 50 of books that means the sales of it are absolutely atrocious. People were not picking this up,” PJ Media contributor Jon Del Arroz, who also writes at Bounding Into Comics, told the site. “It’s not selling. It’s just not there. So this is a huge, huge destructive loss for DC Comics once again as they’re trying to push this agenda everywhere they go, yet nobody wants it.”
After failing with a bisexual Superman and now a gay Green Lantern, I’d be willing to guess that DC Comics will try again with a transgender Wonder Woman. I’m sure that will turn things around for DC Comics.
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