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Friday, September 3, 2010
Strangers With Candy
DC's Minx line
You may have heard that DC Comics is launching a line of graphic novels targeted at teen girls. It’s called Minx, and it features established comics talent and a young-adult novelist who will create work that, they hope, will appeal to some of the girls who likes shôjo manga.
DC VP Karen Berger, who directs the publisher’s Vertigo line, will be helming it with the help of stalwart Vertigo editor Shelly Bond. In an interview at Newsarama, Berger stressed that Minx books won’t display any overt manga influence:
“We’re not bringing in manga storytelling devices, we’re telling clear straightforward stories in a way that we feel they should be told, but we’re not adapting any manga. We’re looking at this as an alternative to manga – as an alternative to young adult fiction – we’re trying to find a new area of contemporary fiction.”
Companies like Seven Seas and Tokyopop have already staked out the manga-influenced market, though none of their global output carries a specific category label like “shôjo” or “shônen.” Scanning through various message boards and creator blogs, global creators seem inclined to resist those kinds of tags anyways, as they didn’t consider a specific demographic during the creative process.
And DC already has a manga imprint, CMX, which offers plenty of licensed Japanese shôjo, including Kyoko Ariyoshi’s ballet classic Swan, Keiko Yamada’s Vs., and Land of the Blindfolded by Sakura Tsukuba. But as for original material, they have little to draw one of the targeted demographic’s attention from Tokyopop’s Fruits Basket or Viz’s Absolute Boyfriend.
So, following in the footsteps of Scholastic’s Graphix line (though acknowledging it with qualification and reluctance), they’re making a bid for a piece of the market pie that’s been out of their reach since the last issue of Amethyst: Princess of Gemworld. It’s a good idea, and they’re throwing what is, for comics, serious money at the initiative, spending a quarter of a million dollars on marketing with Alloy Marketing + Media.
Questions and criticisms have emerged, as they will. Some (like me) hate the name, depending on their associations. (For some, ”minx” equals “pert and sassy.” For others, it translates to “calculatingly coquettish.” Still others think the name is irrelevant and that DC could call it “Skankz” if they liked, as long as the books were good and spoke to the target audience.) Another objection is based on the near-absence of female creators on the creative roster, which at the moment includes only young-adult novelist Cecil Castellucci and Louise Carey, daughter of comics author Mike Carey of Lucifer and X-Men fame.
But the talent of Minx’s initial roster of creators is undeniable. Carey is being joined by Sonny Liew and Marc Hempel, his partners for Vertigo’s charming My Faith in Frankie, a four-issue limited series that was collected in a manga-esque trim size. Castellucci’s story will be illustrated by Jim Rugg, co-creator of the much-loved Street Angel. Versatile talent Andi Watson (creator of Skeleton Key and Geisha and contributor to the recently released Mammoth Book of Best New Manga) is writing one, as is Derek Kirk Kim (Same Difference and Other Stories).
Still, I can’t dismiss the criticism of the gender balance as knee-jerk. While Berger has stated that they aren’t trying to replicate shôjo in aesthetic or narrative terms, I can’t help but think of the history of the category – of how Japanese comics publishers managed to really hook teen girls and create vibrant, varied works for them.
In short, they started hiring women to create manga for young women to read.
Neither Frederik L. Schodt (Manga! Manga! The World of Japanese Comics) nor Paul Gravett (Manga: 60 Years of Japanese Comics) make the argument that manga for girls didn’t exist until women started creating it, but both persuasively suggest that it didn’t become the phenomenon that it is until women broke in to the industry. There were much-loved girls comics created by men (most notably Osamu Tezuka’s Princess Knight, a gender-bending adventure with a sword-wielding heroine), but next to no women were employed in the category until the late 1960s, and many men viewed shôjo as a stepping stone to work in shônen.
But, as Schodt notes, Tezuka’s work in establishing sprawling, long-form manga sagas had helped drive increasing demand and a need for new creators to help meet it. And a new generation of women had been waiting to bring their perspective to the art form, including such legendary figures as Moto Hagio (one of the pioneers of shônen-ai, whose Otherworld Barbara series recently completed its run in Japan), Ryoko Ikeda (will someone please publish an English translation of The Rose of Versailles?), and Keiko Takemiya (whose To Terra was originally published in a shônen magazine and has been picked up for publication in 2007 by Vertical).
And the rest, as they say, is history, which continues to unfold as U.S. readers consume shôjo as fast as publishers can print it.
Admittedly, the phenomenon isn’t really portable. There were cultural and historical circumstances unique to post-war Japan that don’t really exist in the U.S. market now.
First of all, there isn’t the level of audience compartmentalization. Categories like shôjo and shônen don’t have they weight here that’s attributed to them in Japan; if a story sounds good or the art appeals to a given reader, they won’t much care who a Japanese publisher tried to market it to originally. (Of course, DC is shooting for just that kind of compartmentalization with Minx, so maybe it’s more relevant than I think.)
Another factor is general acceptance of the comics medium, which has always been more of a given in Japan than the United States. There’s a devoted audience here, and it seems to be growing all the time, but it’s still a niche. If Minx is going to succeed, it’s going to have to draw at least some of the existing audience for shôjo manga.
And of course there isn’t the magazine structure. Shôjo comics started as supplements to text-based magazines for girls, with the volume of comics content expanding over time and eventually eating some periodicals whole, with new comics-only titles appearing as well. Viz publishes Shojo Beat, serializing some of their licensed series and adding lifestyle content aimed at teen girls, but the only other example of a tie-in I can think of is Svetlana Chmakova’s ongoing “The Adventures of CG!” strip for CosmoGirl, which proudly waves the manga flag. (Perhaps not entirely coincidentally, Chmakova’s Dramacon is one of the best-selling titles in Tokyopop’s global line.)
Last, but certainly not least, women cartoonists are already widely published here. They’re delivering excellent work through Drawn & Quarterly, Oni, Slave Labor, Graphix, Tokyopop, Fantagraphics, Pantheon, Seven Seas, and many others, which barely even scratches the surface of the self-published and webcomic creators. Word has it that Minx aggressively pursued many of these women to make pitches for the line, but none of them ended up on the final roster. Whether that means their pitches were declined or that they had too much on their professional plates to even bother, only the players know. But, unlike Japan’s comics industry at that time, women don’t have to depend on mainstream, corporate comics like DC or Marvel to tell their stories.
I’d never argue that either gender has exclusive ownership of a given audience, as there are too many counter-examples that come to mind before I can even form the argument. I do think the shôjo example is something to consider, though. Because isn’t Minx’s stated goal, to create “a new area of contemporary fiction” for teen girls, precisely what the shôjo pioneers did?
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April 22, 2008:
February 4, 2008:
November 20, 2006:
A Comic-Con without the Captain
