DC Goes Where the Girls Are
This story originally appeared in PW Comics Week on November 28, 2006 Sign up now!
by Rachel Deahl, PW Comics Week -- Publishers Weekly, 11/28/2006
Teenage girls have classically avoided traditional comics, and no company knows this better than DC Comics. In an effort to right that industry wrong and attract a critical market segment,the publisher is launching Minx, a line of graphic novels geared specifically to the female Gen Y set. The imprint, which currently has seven titles on its list, will be unveiled in May 2007 with The Plain Janes.
Janes, about a gaggle of teenage girls with the titular moniker who form a nonconformist "art girl gang," is penned by graphic novel newbie Cecil Castellucci. (Castellucci comes from a YA background, having written The Queen of Cool and Boy Proof.) To get Minx in front of its audience, DC is teaming with Alloy Media + Marketing to promote the line. According to director of publicity David Hyde, DC is putting $250,000 behind the marketing outreach.
Alloy Media + Marketing—parent company of Alloy Entertainment, which has packaged such bestselling YA series as Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants and Gossip Girl (not to mention its more notorious involvement with Kaavya Viswanathan's plagiarized How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild and Got a Life)—will be pushing the imprint in myriad ways. DC will be creating most of the ad content and will rely on Alloy for targeted distribution of its message.
In May, DC will run a two-page advertorial in the Alloy-owned Delia's mail-order clothing catalogue, which is shipped to roughly 900,000 young women. Alloy will also be sending out e-mail blasts about the series through its collection of Web sites (which include prom.com and delias.com) and, in September, distributing nearly 100,000 textbook covers featuring Minx titles to schools.
After May, new Minx series will bow every month, beginning with Re-Gifters, about a Korean-American girl, in June, and, in July, Clubbing, about a modern-day spoiled Nancy Drew who solves mysteries in the British countryside. Despite the visibility of Castellucci, whose series is launching the line, Minx will draw heavily from creators actively working on comics. All the books will be standalone originals that may or may not turn into multi-volume series. (The series will also feature a healthy mix of female and male creators.)
Some of the bigger names attached include Andi Watson, one of the authors of Clubbing, whose past work includes the graphic novels Geisha and Breakfast After Noon (among others). Writer Mike Carey, who's worked on the Eisner-nominated Lucifer series and the Vertigo flagship title Hellblazer, will be penning Re-Gifters with, as one of his artists, Marc Hempel (best known for his collaboration on Neil Gaiman's Sandman). And Derek Kirk Kim, best known for his Eisner award-winning collection Same Difference and Other Stories, will be writing and drawing Minx's August release, Good as Lily, about a high schooler dealing with the appearance of younger and older versions of himself.
Paul Levitz, president and publisher of DC Comics, said he hopes Minx will be "a distinctive brew unto itself," as opposed to a comics variation on YA or manga. Adding that comics lost female readers some 30 years ago when romance comics disappeared, Levitz said that publishers essentially abandoned the demographic. "Nobody put a lot of effort into trying to reach [female readers] for the next couple of decades." Now, with comics being sold through mainstream retailers (as opposed to just specialty comics shops), and with so many girls reading manga, the moment seemed right for Minx.
So will any superheroes make it into the line? According to Levitz it's highly unlikely that any tights-clad save-the-day types will be part of this "new brew."
