Minx Selling More in Direct Market?

David Welsh responds to my recent Minx overview by saying:

I can understand the desire to quash the notion that the books actually sold better in specialty comic shops than bookstores, because that certainly couldn’t have been the desired outcome.

Well, it might have. That result makes sense, once you look at the factors involved. Bookstore buyers aren’t afraid of manga and are eager to carry a full range of graphic novels. The same for librarians, who have a good network of recommendations and awards to guide them. Both are looking at a much greater pool of material to choose the best from.

Direct market retailers, on the other hand, value DC as a brand name a great deal. They don’t like manga because there’s too much of it to study in order to make sensible decisions, and some of them, well, they don’t really want too many female readers in the clubhouse. So it seems reasonable, by that skewed logic, that they’d invest in a DC-backed non-manga attempt to attract girls. It’s familiar to them, and it isn’t foreign. (Don’t underestimate this factor. Some retailers aren’t comfortable with comics where they can’t pronounce the non-American names creating it.)

DC, as a company, may not want Minx to be too successful, anyway, because it would put the lie to many of the pieces of received wisdom that they’ve been comforting themselves with all these years. And their strong relationship with the direct market makes it difficult to be successful in the bookstore market, because it’s seen as disloyalty to their “core customers”.