When a big announcement hits in the comic industry, particularly if it’s about the demise of a publisher or a publisher’s line, you can count on a set of predictable reactions, followed by a set of cliches to describe those reactions—armchair/Monday morning quarterbacking, post mortem, finger-pointing, I-told-you-so—followed by a few cries to leave the poor people whose venture failed alone, followed by more reactions that open with an apology for it being yet another a reaction. Far be it from me to be left out of this, so I’m delving into this, though at this point, I have more questions than answers. And the first question is “Why?”
What I’m talking about, of course, is the cancellation of DC’s young adult graphic novel imprint, Minx, less than two years after it launched. I’m loathe to ascribe motivations when I don’t know all the details, but here’s how the situation looks: Modest success in the graphic novel section of bookstores was not enough. Surprising success in comic book stores was not what DC wanted. The problem was that Minx failed to find a place in the young adult sections of Barnes and Noble and Borders stores, which were the spots coveted by DC’s bookstore distributor Random House.
Did those who make such decisions at DC think they would get more sales in the YA section? I must assume they did, or they wouldn’t have pursued that placement and then cut off the imprint when it didn’t come to pass. After all, YA is one of the few categories in publishing that has been growing over the past few years (comics is another). But I have another question, one that I can’t answer with assumptions: Did DC think that placement in YA would give the books more legitimacy? Many of those commenting on the situation have opined that American comic books do not appeal to teenage girls who read manga and that DC did not know how to pursue an audience that does not really exist for its main line of comics. But wouldn’t DC’s desire to get into the YA section be a reflection of their understanding of those issues and their attempt to overcome them? Would the YA section give Minx both the advantage of an audience not prejudiced to prefer manga and the sheen of being shelved outside of the graphic novel ghetto? Perhaps Minx might have accomplished the goal of reaching its desired audience in a different way, one that might have found more success more quickly, but I think there is a kind of logic for DC’s desire to find their audience outside of the manga and graphic novel section.
The problem with this, however, as comics retailer Chris Butcher points out, is that DC was placing itself smack in the young adult publishing world, requiring Minx editors to develop stories for a market outside of their sphere of knowledge. And despite the growth in young adult fiction, this is perhaps a market that comics people would be better off avoiding. Young Adult falls under the protection of what I sometimes jokingly call the “real” publishing industry, which is not a heartening place to be right now—as I learned from a New York Magazine article, banefully titled “The End,” that I happened to be reading when the Minx news hit.
Traditional publishing is a confusing mass of former small publishers (which worked rather the way independent comics publishers do now) that were encompassed by larger ones and then by larger ones until publishers were bloated, sprawling citadels and suburbs with no defining vision, populated with new CEOs who have never worked in publishing, disaffected and dread-filled editors, chummy agents, superstar and attempts-at-the-next-big-thing authors who receive mind-boggling advances, writers whose talent aren’t enough to get them book deals because all the money was used up on advances for other authors, and the very occasional author who finds success and can make it stick. And they’re all a little nervous about their futures. The New York Magazine article by Boris Kachka, opens with a morbid video on an editor’s laptop screen: “...a giant steel shredder disgorges a ragged mess of paper and cardboard onto a conveyor belt. This is the fate of up to 25 percent of the product churned out by New York’s publishing machine.”
While most bookstore sales have been declining, sales of graphic novels in books stores have increased nearly tenfold since 2001. But despite the figures—and even those are less encouraging if you consider the fates of TokyoPop (though it’s easy to blame that on hubris) and Borders—there is still a problem for books like those published by Minx, as well as for those published by independent publishers (where much of Minx’s talent came from in the first place—yes, I had to get that in). The bookstores seem unwilling to move graphic novels out of the section specified for them, even though graphic novels cover a wide range of genres and reading levels. In the graphic novel section, books like Minx’s and indie publishers’ books fall between the established bookstore categories, being neither manga nor superhero books. In an environment where books live or die by their shelf space, this is not good news.
And consider this—shelf space isn’t just a matter of the bookstore chains’ systems of categorization; prominent placement is also for sale: Kachka writes in his article, “Publishers also pay for placement in big bookstores, which they call ‘co-op,’ under a complicated arrangement meant to cover up the fact that it’s payola (or, as some call it, extortion).” I won’t speculate about whether DC paid for prominent placement for Minx and what the potential answers to that question say about why the imprint “failed.” (I don’t think it actually did fail; Minx was not around long enough to fail or succeed.) I am interested in this detail because it reveals that the bookstore system is much different from the one comics publishers are used to. If we offered money to comic book store owners for prominent placement, it might be called bribery. If they asked for us to pay in order to get good placement in their stores, our sense of ethics might balk.
But that is the system at work in the bookstore market, and even traditional publishers, who should be inured to it, and whose constant driving for the next bestseller contributed to creating it, are floundering. Can we say that comics have been beneficiaries of the scarce good news coming out of the publishing world, in spite of stocking and categorization problems, because we have not acted like the rest of publishing world? And can we say that the reason Minx was canceled was because DC put publishing industry expectations of relatively large profit margins and fast results on the imprint? Or, as comic book publishers try to imitate traditional publishers, are we going to see that good news dwindle, just as it has for them?
I’m sorry that I have so many questions and few answers. But questions are where we start to learn, and there definitely is a lot of that to be done as we venture into what seems, from the outside, like a world that is either heading for collapse or or looking for new vision to reshape it.
