I Blame the Boob-Window — Or: Why Girls Don't Read Comics

Girls power: What do Power Girl and her ever-present "boob window" have to do with the shuttering of Minx? The Monkey has a theory.

DC Comics

 

Last Thursday, DC Comics announced it was folding Minx, the company's line of graphic novels aimed at teenage girls, just a little over a year after the imprint's much-ballyhooed launch.

Now, the moment that word came down, the vasty comics blogosphere started filling up with words of its own: that familiar blend of opinion, analysis, finger-pointing, and the sentiment expressed so frequently on the Internet it should have its own Blogspot macro: "If-only-they'd-listened-to-me."

One big reason the fall of Minx so intrigues the comics cognoscenti: Minx was a part of DC, and DC is a part of Time-Warner.

So its demise means that even a girl-targeted comics line that gets produced, distributed and marketed under the aegis of mega-gargantua-Brobdignagian corporate overlords — overlords with Scrooge McDuck-size piles of cash at their command — can't find an audience.

Why don't girls read comics?

That, it turns out, is a stupid question.

After the jump: the comics that girls are already reading, the comics they aren't, and what the belly shirt has to do with it all.

First of all: Teenage girls are already reading comics. Gobbling them up by the metric ton. It's just that the particular comics they're devouring happen to be:

1. Generally referred to by another name;
2. Published in digest-sized paperbacks, not traditional "comic book" form;
3. Easier to find in chain bookstores than in local comic shops;
4. Peopled not by sinewy do-gooders in capes, but by an assortment of dewy-eyed, tiny-nosed teens sporting shocks of hair so huge you might assume they've got angry badgers strapped to their scalps, and;
5. Read right to left, not left to right.

Which is to say: manga.

You'll find shelves and shelves of pawed-over manga in any chain bookstore you walk into. (Look for the aisles where tweens strew themselves across the floor in great heaps, like pods of elephant seals in Hot Topic baby tees.)

But DC and Marvel don't much care about that, because these girls aren't reading their comics -- the kind featuring the rosters of superheroes they own and heavily license.

Middle-aged fanboys like me long ago surrendered our wills to these corporate-shills-in-spandex. We slavishly follow their exploits year after year, buying up even the most tangentially related/patently dumb merch, because the companies got their hooks into us at an early, impressionable age.

But as we grow older and increasingly arteriosclerotic, comic companies are wisely beginning to look past us.

Only just beginning, however: Your average superhero book continues to cater to the traditional, overwhelmingly male and heterosexual demographic. That means even a strong, well-rounded female character is invariably depicted as ... ah, well-rounded.

And wearing a bustier.

Or a belly shirt.

Or, perhaps most indefensibly, a boob-window — the rendering of which often defies both gravity and human physiology, as we currently understand them.

Now, sure — all superheroes, male and female, embody physical ideals that can be counted upon to instill body dysmorphic disorder in both sexes.

But there's a default cheesecakery that clings to the superhero page, repelling female readers who aren't much interested in seeing just what the male adolescent id looks like in four-color multi-panel glory.

Understand: There are plenty of women who adore superheroes. More and more of them write and draw superhero books themselves.

But there are many more whose tastes run to independent/alternative comic book fare -- smaller, slice-of-life, character-driven tales about relationships, nonconformity, sacrificing for one's art and, with a notable if puzzling frequency, the Pacific Northwest.

That black-and-white indie vibe is what Minx tried to capture, and there are several theories why it didn't succeed:

1. The books weren't any good.
(I don't buy this one, personally. The Minx books I read were smart, engaging, straightforward reads that didn't talk down to their audience. Yes, some of 'em carried a faint whiff of airless, self-important preciousness, but that's something that plagues many indie comics. Faulting them for that is like faulting superhero books for being formulaic, or episodes of Law and Order for being obsessed with crime.)

2. The books were hard to find.
(Not an issue in comic shops, where they sold reasonably well, but evidently there was some confusion at the mega-chains, where they'd wind up in manga, or graphic novels, or young adult, or even plain ol' fiction.)

3. Expectations were too high.
(I'm leaning toward this one, personally.)

So we stand today in a Minx-less world, with the failure of yet another comic company's attempt to reach beyond the small, vituperative circle of fortysomething men who can reel off the membership roster of the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants without prompting.

If you are now, or ever were, a teenage girl, let's hear from you: What if any comics are/were you interested in reading? Indie comic alterna-fare? Mainstream good-vs.-evil beat-em-ups? Manga? Betty and Veronica Finally Wise Up, Dump Archie and Start a Wymyn's Art Colony Together? What?

Also, ladies: where do you stand on the cheesecake issue? Are you inclined to accept it as just part of the spandex-clad landscape, or does it kinda bug you?
--Glen Weldon

1:00 PM ET | 10- 1-2008 | permalink

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