Goodnight, Minx
Last week, Minx failed. In case you don’t know, Minx is a tiny branch of DC that created comics devoted to female teens and tweens. Unfortunately, the targeted audience just wasn’t all that interested, and I can probably tell you why.
Personally, when an advent like this fails, I feel very disheartened. Minx was created by Shelly Bond (a talented DC editor) as an alternative to manga/superheroes and a straighter pathway towards independant comics. DC plunged millions of dollars into this venture, without what seemed any idea if it would work. Twenty-two months later and the whole thing collapsed on itself.
I have a few books from their line, and honestly, I didn’t much enjoy them (even though the stories are really up my alley). Which is fine, since I’m much older than the targeted group. But I thought it’s telling that the younger crowd didn’t enjoy them either. They had a very narrow focus; pre-teen hipster type girl heroines interested in art/politics. The Plain Janes followed a high schooler named Jane who survived a terrorist attack in the city, moved to the suburbia and started an art movement. Burnout was about a girl who moved to the middle of nowhere and became an eco-terrorist. Water Baby was a bit mature for the 13 year old crowd, I thought, it was about a girl whose leg got bitten off by a shark and then her boyfriend took advantage of her new weakness. The language of all the books was simple but the content was perhaps just too narrow for pre-high schoolers who are mostly not at all like the characters. The panel style was kind of boring (4 or 6 similar panels a page). And the drawings were …well, kind of static. It’s just not what the Gossip Girl generation wants right now.
Honestly, I thought that if they had one hit, they could have survived. And maybe they would have found that hit if they tried for longer than two years. Brian Wood (of DMZ) just wrote The New York Four (about four girls living in NY) for Minx, and it was bringing in decent reviews. It’s not exactly Sailor Moon yet, but I really felt the line could have survived.
Good night, Minx. I’m sorry to see you go..
October 7th, 2008 at 10:09 am
This is a very interesting post. You should def post more about the comic book/graphic novel world. I think the issue here on some level is the content not necessarily matching the form. This target group gets these types of stories from other sources and from the sound of it, in better ways. What this series needed to do was give them something new and different, using the comic book form to reel in a new generation and group of readers. Young girls, like any other group, want a good story, great art, and something “buzzy” they could obsess over. They don’t need the same cliche content manufactured for them, they need great content that would appeal to anyone, with maybe a little something that they could relate to. Example…if Death Note were a bit less cerebral, repetitive, and had stronger female characters, I think it could appeal to this group. You have hot guys running around being hot and thoughtful, and the pictures are pretty. So something like that would have worked better than narrow characters designed to appeal to this group.
So sad it went down though because the idea behind it was inspired.
October 13th, 2008 at 3:14 pm
These kind of unfortunate events take place when a great idea gets into hands of a bunch of snobs not people who really care.