Posted in: Comics | Tagged: dc, jim lee

Jim Lee Is Confident That 15% to 45% of DC's Readers Are Women

Published Tue, 08 Aug 2017 10:00:30 -0500

Talk about hedging your bets!

In one of the least committal statistics ever released by a comic book publisher, DC's Jim Lee revealed that the percentage of DC's readers that are women is somewhere between 15% and 45%, or, in other words, almost none, or nearly half.

Lee bases the numbers, basically, on guesswork, according to an interview with ICv2.

"We have information from our digital sales, for example," said Lee in the interview. "We will have some titles -‑ and I want to say it was Smallville ‑- that track as high as 40% female, or at least the people that were purchasing the content through their accounts."

With Smallville as the high benchmark, Lee moved to other sources for the low, such as his personal Instragram followers.

"I have information, my own anecdotal information like my Instagram account — 270,000 followers. I don't know how of many of those actually read comic books, but they break down male/female, and that's about 85/15."

If Instagram followers are an indicator of comic book sales, does that mean that half of DC's readers are plates of food or cute dogs?

"If I had to hazard a guess, I feel very confident that that number is between 15 and 40%," Lee said of DC's female readership. It's a big change from 30 years ago, according to Lee, who knows "for sure" that comic-con was 95% male back in the day.

"Again, it's hard to track exactly how many of those people are buying comics," said Lee, though that didn't stop him from naming a spread that covers a third of all possible outcomes. "But certainly, the audience has changed, and for the better."

Jim, we appreciate the effort. But sometimes it's okay to just say "I don't know."

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