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Counterintuitively, when I saw books from DC's Minx line, a graphic-novel imprint aimed at tween and teen girls, on the shelves of my public library (most often
P.L.A.I.N. Janes,
Re-Gifters and
Good As Lily), I knew it wasn't a good sign. (It was an even worse sign when my branch library temporarily moved
all of the non-manga YA (Young Adult) graphic novels into the CDs for space reasons. In libraries, as in bookstores, shelving is everything.[1] They eventually grouped them back together though.) For the Minx books to be the success they needed to be to justify the $250,000 promotional price tag (I got that figure from
The NY Times),[2] they needed to belong to the invisible library.
Let me back up. When I moved to Seattle in 2003, the glamorous Central Library we have today was still being built. The city had brought in a famous architect to design it, Rems Koolhaas, and there was a lot of fanfare when it opened. But the book collection looked skimpier than my hometown one (which services a much smaller population), and the way that the Central Library is laid out, it didn't look like they were planning to add in more shelves anytime soon. The lack of books and puzzling layout seemed somewhat bizarre, since Seattle is such a book-loving town.
Then, a couple of things became clear to me. One, the Seattle Public Library (SPL) is basically entirely separate from the King County Library system, so I was looking at just the city collection, not the county one. Two, I went to put something on hold, and the SPL system had 17 copies of the book I wanted, but I was hold #77. When I went to go check the status of my hold, more people had queued up behind me, which meant that the books I was seeing on the shelf — especially with graphic novels and manga, categories that have boomed in libraries only over the last 10 years or so — were only the unpopular ones, ones that had once been popular, or strays from a popular series. Ergo, all of the popular graphic novels and manga were never hitting the shelf. (For example, years later, although the Seattle Public Library has all of the volumes of Rumiko Takahashi's
Ranma ½, I've only ever seen one or two shelved volumes.) The purpose of the Central Library isn't to house books — it's to process them while providing a cool-looking community information center and public space for tourists and patrons, as well as to provide a forum for visiting lecturers.[3] Minus the tourists and possibly the lecturers, depending on the burg, I suspect public libraries in general will continue to develop this way.
This was in stark contrast to my initial experience reading comics — back in the mid-to-late'90s, I could venture into 741.5952 where
V for Vendetta,
Love and Rockets,
Cathy and
Oh! My Goddess coexisted peacefully, and I read them all. Those days are long over, of course — even in my hometown, those books are gone entirely from the shelves, put behind the counter because of theft.[4]
As much as I miss the pleasure of discovery of the old system, there are advantages to this new, database-centered one. For one thing, it makes getting your hands on serial literature so much easier. When you're relying on picking up books off the shelf, it's easy to get the order of titles in a series confused, or for books to go missing and never replaced, whereas the movement to provide clear numbering of graphic-novel series (due to manga's influence) makes it easy to figure out where the gaps are in a series, especially when you're solely going through a database.
That said, database-centric browsing systems that libraries and online booksellers use (i.e. Amazon.com), are terrible, in general, for building a publisher's or an imprint's brand identity from scratch for the public. Despite its highly marketed launch, Minx is a perfect example of DC's struggles in the bookstore market, where there's little recognition of its brand (even though lots of people saw
The Dark Knight movie, many, if not most, of them probably couldn't identify, off the top of their heads, whether Batman is a Marvel or DC character) within systems in which everything is shelved (and cataloged) either by title or author. (In bookstores, unlike libraries, at least, you have the display options of endcaps, dumps, waterfalls and spinner racks to group a publisher's books together.)
It seems to me that DC could have gone one of about three ways with the Minx line: as Dirk Deppey said, they could have built the Minx line slowly,[5] and, on my part here, ideally with quality books (owned by the creators — with some of that marketing money diverted into equitable page rates[6]). Alternatively, given that DC's partner in marketing the Minx line, the book packager Alloy Entertainment, responsible for best-selling series for primarily female YA readers like
The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants and
Gossip Girl, uses work-for-hire and copyright practices very much like DC's or Marvel's in book publishing,[7] it's a bit odd that DC didn't utilize their comic-shop-market techniques to help build their brand in libraries and bookstores — piggybacking on trends[8], synergizing with other properties under their corporate parent, Warner Bros., putting out serialized work instead of a variety of stand-alone titles, etc. Or, like Dark Horse, they could have done a mixture of the two: subsidized creator-owned, quality books with some work-for-hire licensed books.
Notes:
[1] As Shannon Smith pointed out in his blog.
http://www.spaghettijunk.blogspot.com/[2]
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/25/arts/design/25minx.html[3] There's one floor that you can only get to by elevator or the stairs. It's all red, has no books or computers, and makes you feel like Michael Anderson is going to come dancing out, talking backwards.
[4] This is the case in bookstores too. I used to be enraged when bookstores didn't have all of the
Sandman volumes on the shelves, until a friend told me that the instant they were put out, they were stolen, and so had to be kept behind the counter.
[5] As Dirk Deppey wrote in Jounalista: "Living within your limits, keeping your ambitions within reach and building incrementally for the long haul: These are the qualities required to pioneer a new form of literature in a low-margin world where returnability and limited shelf-space reward long-term thinking and a conservative approach to risk."
[6] Andi Watson wrote in his November 26th, 2006 blog entry, "… to be honest the page rate on a regular monthly book is better than on the MINX titles."
[7]
Ghost writing, "copyright sharing," etc. [8] As Mark Engblom pointed out on the
The Beat message board, though it was trumpeted that the Minx line was supposed to be for girls with a variety of interests, the books were mostly about, in his words, "artsy-progressive, Boho culture alterna-misfits." Publicity mentioned that the Minx moniker was focus-tested: it it possible too much of their demographic research was comprised of New York teens?
Image credits:
Click above for full-sized images
Good as Lily written by Derek Kirk Kim, drawn by Jesse Hamm
©2007 Derek Kirk Kim and DC Comics
Kimmie66 ©2007 Aaron Alexovich
The P.L.A.I.N. Janes written by Cecil Castellucci and drawn by Jim Rugg
©2007 Cecil Castellucci and Jim Rugg
Kristy Valenti currently works for The Comics Journal and Fantagraphics Books, Inc.
Uncharted Territory is © Kristy Valenti, 2010
