The comics in general got a lot more diverse in the 90's, but let's be honest. Like most science fiction from the golden age, comics from Marvel were created in the 60's and have been largely stagnant in a way since. Created by white and often Jewish men, it was simply the way things were done.
The 80's brought in more variety with the black and white boom in independent publishing with all kinds of stories and characters. But even then, it was largely white male creators.
The 90's had the Big Two adopting more diversity, though there's still plenty of struggles.
Origins and context is important. As well as knowledge of how the industry has changed since those days. The Big Two aren't about creating new characters so much these days because of ownership issues, lawsuits and so forth. if a creator cuts his teeth working for them, he then goes independent/creator owned to make his own thing. Those are getting a bit more interest in things like adaptations these days, which is good.
That's not to say that the comics field can't do more, especially the Big Two. But they're bound by interesting market forces and an aging demographic. I simply dislike the whole aspect of pointing out that a group that was created 50 years ago, and is chock full of a lot of diversity overall that doesn't get recognized in the mainstream, gets painted as a problem.
Yes, I grew up on comics. I still read some from a range of different people and companies and a lot of them are quite diverse in story, character, race and gender. But like we see with so many things, there has to be some context put into it. Asimov gets grief for not having much in the way of strong women in his books that were written in serial form in the 40's. It's true, but you have to look at the time it was written and take that into account. The same here.
I wish US comics were done similar in gender approach to how it is in Japan, though not completely. There's such a large focus on girls and women's comics there that are fantastic and amazing (check out Princess Jellyfish sometime) that it completely shames what we do here. But culturally, we're simply too different in terms of accepting print comic material as adults.
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