The end of a (very short) era.

An announcement went out this morning to the effect that DC/Vertigo is cancelling its teen/tween line, Minx. A lot of people have already weighed in on the topic, primarily with a bummed-but-resigned “Well, what did you expect?” shrug.
Just because it was expected doesn’t mean it isn’t a damn shame. [More after the jump]

Those books are good. I am perhaps ::mumble mumble:: years past being the primary demographic, but they were good stories and interesting art; I was on pins and needles for Water Baby, the upcoming title from the wonderful Ross Campbell, author of The Abandoned. (Emo! Drama! Zombies!)
But the real question here has been packaging and marketing towards a heretofore ignored market: teenage girls. Japanese manga has an enormous range of comics, called shojo, marketed in exactly that direction, and it does incredibly well. Why not here?
Traditionally, teenage girls have been happily reading comics all along; just not comics that were in any way deliberately marked as “girl books”. I grew up on Sandman and Sin City and Johnny The Homicidal Maniac; as a result, as a regular old grown-up, I read anything I can get my grubby little hands on.
But – and here’s where the what-were-they-thinking naysayers are missing an important point, I think – girls who did not grow up where comics are readily available, encouraged, or passed around the school hallways, have no immediately obvious ways of getting to comics.
DC couldn’t rely on teenage nerds like me to get interested in comics by chance. They needed to bring in new audiences from other fields; and girls who will happily read Harry Potter or Gossip Girls might be put off by the cover of Sin City, but would recognize the cover of Janes In Love (Minx’s most popular series) as something that is intended for them, and thus something worth trying. The Minx books served as both great entertainment – Token and Good As Lily, for example, are marvelous fun – but also as a gateway drug to those Vertigo titles that those girls might otherwise never have found.
And yes, they were pink, and girly-looking, and didn’t look like “real” comics. But that’s an unnecessarily cliquey way of thinking about it. Thank God, we have long passed the days when I would walk into comics stores and the proprietors and other customers alike would fall silent, and someone would finally walk up to me and ask me if I was in the right place. Most readers of fiction, statistically, are women, and I for one would like to be able to catch those readers as teenagers and give them something great to read – which would hook those readers in for life. Minx had a lot of hurdles to jump – the economy, the novelty of the line, the paucity of female authors on its roster – but it had the right idea, and I genuinely hope that another line will arise to fill its place.