It's a Wednesday at Fantom Comics in Washington, D.C., and the store is bustling. Every Wednesday is New Comics Day — when subscribers come in to pick up the week's new titles, check in with each other, and talk comics. This Wednesday is no different. Well. It's a little different. I'm used to comics-shop chatter that revolves around things like which new books are worth checking out, what storylines have gone one way too long, and which hero could kick which other hero's butt. Generally speaking, the word demographics doesn't crop up as much as it does today. "We live in 2017," customer Erin Lisette tells me, "in a day and age where there are so many different demographics reading these comics, and most importantly, children! And it's like, GUYS. Maybe this was okay in the '30s, '40s, maybe even '50s, but come on: there are these kids with brown skin and different textured hair and all these different features reading these books and they never see themselves represented as the good guy. And that sucks." She's reacting to remarks made to the website ICv2 last week by Marvel Comics' VP of Sales, David Gabriel. He gave an interview about some of the feedback he had heard at a sales summit with the country's top comics shop owners and managers. "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. I don't know that that's really true, but that's what we saw in sales." He later clarified that even though some of those retailers weren't happy with recent Marvel decisions (decisions which include making Iron Man a young black woman — long story) the company's commitment to their increasingly diverse roster of heroes remained firm. Controversy It didn't much matter that only two of the retailers who attended the summit expressed misgivings about books featuring women and people of color, while the rest maintained that those books were selling well in their shops. The damage was done. The many, many headlines that followed — "Marvel Blames Diversity For Sales Slump," fueled a lot of online disbelief and outrage and thinkpieces offering alternative explanations for why Marvel's titles might be selling less. Fantom's second-in-command, Leah Ly, wonders if Marvel's recent strategy of big crossover events — mini-series that require readers to buy many different titles — might have some customers shying away. "Marvel's in a bit of event fatigue right now," she says, "because they've had two years of events, and people are a little tired." Other potential reasons for a recent Marvel's sales slump? Cover price (especially compared to DC, whose "Rebirth" relaunch featured reduced prices across their entire line, at least at first), and the fact that some of their top writers and artists are making the jump to independent publishers, where they can own the characters and the stories they tell. New readers But Ly is quick to point out that any readers and retailers who reject diversity aren't the whole story. There's a new comics readership coming in — she sees them every day — readers who are eager for different kinds of heroes. Readers like Lisa Fumia, visiting Fantom from Tulsa, Okla. "I'm a mixed woman," Fumia tells me, "so I would like to see more people color, and more people who look like me, or that I can at least somewhat identify with. I think that's important." So even if it's true that a core cohort of longtime readers prefer to stick to the old, male, white heroes, industry surveys show that the fastest growing demographic — there's that word again — of comics readers are women ...