Claudia Mercado

Claudia’s: My name is Claudia Mercado. Many people will argue that there isn't much diversity in comic books and superheroes. I will have to agree with this but even though American comics are mostly white superheroes I believe that there are many good reasons as to why this is. Comics were first release around the 1940's and this was a completely different time period as it is now. For example many African American were still treated differently than Whites were and racial discrimination towards African Americans relegated them to lower paying jobs. So if the majority of the working class were Whites then one of the reason I believe that the authors of comics were targeting the attention of Whites was because they were the ones who could afford to buy them. In business in order to sell your product successfully you want to connect to the consumer which is what I think companies selling comic books were doing. I would also like to point out that there isn't many female superheroes which many people would believe to be sexist. But once again we are in a different time period where women still weren't considered equivalent to men. During the 1940's women weren't depicted as strong, independent or superior which is probably why authors of these comics wouldn't want to portray women as these strong superheroes and cause controversy which would had most likely caused sales of comic books to decrease. So there are many reasons to justify why comic books didn't have much diversity back when they were first released but I can’t say the same for today. We are now living in times where we all are supposed to be treated equal because we do live in the United States which is known for freedom and equality.