The Beat pointed to an article on Women’s Wear Daily that has the lowdown on Marvel’s new licensing deals for products for girls and women including jewelry and makeup as well as the more obvious things like T-shirts.
Paul Gitter, who is the president of consumer products, North America, for Marvel Entertainment Inc., says when doing such things, they have to be “very careful” not to “alienate our core” audience — in other words, boys don’t want a bunch of girls wearing T-shirts with Spider-man on them. Or something.
Vice president of product merchandising at Marvel, Susan Fields, also says “Hulk was a big component for us when it came to being eco-friendly, with T-shirts featuring the character and sayings like ‘go green.’ ” I wish I could make this stuff up.
But overall, I’m really pretty OK with this. I’ve often wished that comic book T-shirts came in girly styles (I am not someone who wears an XXL) and maybe in earlier days, some Marvel lip gloss would’ve been a fun purchase for me.
Still, with Marvel’s other attempts at reaching out to young women (including the recent adaptation of Pride and Prejudice) makes me believe they don’t really know what they’re doing (but since these are licensing deals, the actual product development will probably be in the hands of people who have experience making products for women).
I don’t think this will get women reading comics, though, and I don’t think that’s really the point. After all, plenty of women connect with the character of Wonder Woman but have no interest in picking up comics about her. This is just about taking the cool iconography of comics and selling it to people. But I’m also OK with that.
Image of Marvel lip glosses, taken from WWD.com
