…I think it’s not only excellent that DC is publishing a line for teen female readers, it’s doubly excellent that there’s a teen female writer involved in the line as well. So my instinct is to write something that would, in effect, praise all involved–in essence, give them a tickertape parade and the key to the city.

—Jeff Lester, on DC’s Minx line in general and Mike Carey, Louise Carey, and Aaron Alexavitch’s Confessions of a Blabbermouth in particular.

I think this is an instinct worth fighting against. I’m saying this without having read any Minx books, so that’s not a dig against them or the line at all. What I mean is twofold:

First, consciously gearing your entertainment product toward a particular demographic is a value-neutral act. This may be less apparent in comics because the art form in North America has been so completely dominated for so long by products geared toward men in their teens, 20s, and 30s, with that age bracket edging upward year in and year out, which makes it look like a comic geared toward any other group is half-act of charity, half-revolutionary declaration. But it is in fact still the case. It’s not remarkable that there are books and movies and TV shows geared toward women and men and teens and tweens and gay people and black people and whatever else, and it really shouldn’t be that remarkable that the same is true in comics. What would be remarkable is if they were good comics, regardless of the target demographic.

Second, involving a member of the target demographic in the creation of entertainment product for that demographic is also value-neutral. It can be good, it can lend authenticity to the work, it can lead to writing with an ear for the attitudes and dialogue inherent to that demographic, but it could just as easily do none of those things. John Kerry and John McCain are Vietnam veterans and by most accounts behaved admirably during that war, but I doubt either of them would make better Vietnam movies than Francis Ford Coppola or Stanley Kubrick. So having a teenage girl co-write a comic about teenage girls for teenage girls is unremarkable. What would be remarkable is if it were a good comic, regardless of who wrote it.

You’ll notice that I’m using the word “product” here. I use it to refer to art that is intended to serve a demographic first and foremost, before any other concerns, possibly even before any other ideas about the work form in the heads of the creators at all. Again, I’m not doing this to slag on the Minx line, with which I’m not terribly familiar other than to say that Jim Rugg drew one and I love Jim Rugg and that book looked really lovely when I flipped through it. In that same piece, Jeff puts it thusly:

DC’s Minx line openly promotes itself as being for female teen readers and I think that’s good: OGNs aimed at teen females is a market that’s worth tapping into; the more teens, females, and female teens we get reading comics the better; and if a teen who wanders into a shop looking for the next Minx book ends up picking up, say, Jaime Hernandez’s Locas, then, really, the whole thing is worth it. But by creating a book line with such a clearly defined target audience and a clearly defined goal, you’re one step closer to creating books that are more product than art. And while I don’t have a particular problem with that–I don’t mind picking up a Minx book knowing it’s unlikely I’m going to read some intense work of raw personal vision, the next Diary of a Teenage Girl by Phoebe Gloeckner–I do think the closer a work comes to being product, the higher the expectation becomes that the product be of professional standards.

What’s interesting and maybe troubling about this formulation is that making great comics is an ancillary concern at best. These comics are supposed to be worthwhile 1) because teen females are an underserved market; 2) because introducing women and teenagers to the industry is good for the bottom line; 3) because maybe they’ll eventually lead those women and teenagers to pick up comics that are great. But the possibility of being a work of Diary of a Teenage Girl-level passion and genius isn’t even entertained.

Mind you, the only reason I’m focusing on this particular demographic is because I noticed Jeff’s post; the same things can be said for any number of “new mainstream” efforts to provide competent genre-based entertainment for the non-superhero, non-art comics, non-manga comics readers out there, or the theoretical ones that might manifest were such comics made available. I don’t doubt for a second that there are tons of great romance comics and young-adult comics and action comics and detective comics (as opposed to Action Comics and Detective Comics, which happen to be pretty good themselves these days) floating around in some cartoonists’ heads out there quite independent of whether a targeted line or a company that specializes in getting its books optioned by Hollywood exists to publish them, or that some of those comics do indeed end up at some of those outlets. I just want to see things proceed in that order. Anything else strikes me as a desire to create the comics equivalent of a sitcom that NBC aired after Friends or an action movie you might half-watch on a cross country flight. What’s really strange about it is that in some quarters this is seen as some sort of triumph for comics. It’s like, I can see where Kim Thompson was coming from when he perjoratively said “more crap is what we need,” but it’s weird to me that people are excited to create it, or to champion its creation.

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