Yes, More Minx

David Welsh has some of the best and most intelligent comments on the new Minx line floating around the blogs, imo. His recent article for Comic World News is no exception. (via CC) In it he does a great job of explaining something that's been bugging me for a couple days now (and in an aside, no less).

He starts out by admitting that:

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.

But then adds:

(Of course, DC is shooting for just that kind of compartmentalization with Minx, so maybe it’s more relevant than I think.)

EXACTLY

Look, I'm not at all pleased that kids are so gender consious when picking books. And not all kids are. And boys tend to be more so than girls. (I'd love to see a graphic novel imprint for 10-14 year-old boys try to make it with mostly female creators.)

So, it really shouldn't matter that Minx currently has only one and half female authors.

Except that the girls that are going to be appealed to through names like Minx and authors like Castellucci tend to be, in my experience, among the most gender conscious for their age. Not every girl will care about the gender of the creators. Most girls won't. But the ones that do are the same ones that DC seems to be going for. Which really begs the question - WTF were they thinking?

I would also like to point out - as others already have - that girls wanting books that are about being girls to be written by people who were once girls is more along the lines of wanting mysteries to be written by people with experience in solving them. It doesn't make sense as a hard and fast rule, but it's not completely illogical to consider such things when one is deciding on whether or not to try a new series. You may already know that Mike Carey rocks, but your average Clique reader hasn't ever heard of him.