X-Men Misfits No More

X-Men: Misfits

X-Men: Misfits was a shojo twist on the superhero team that came out Summer 2009.

Now, its future (or lack thereof) has been revealed on Twitter. First, @debaoki asked

got a tweet from a reader that Del Rey has opted to not publish X-Men Misfits Vol. 2. true? not true?

To which @yaytime, aka co-writer Dave Roman, responded

Wow! News travels fast! @goraina [co-writer Raina Telgemeier] and I super disappointed since it was written as a 2-part story and it will be unfair to readers.

We only found out last week. We still don’t have a lot of the details beyond it being a cost of licensing vs. profits issue. :/

X-Men: Misfits

@Kuriosity pointed out that

X-Men Misfits 2 disappeared from a few retail sites earlier in the week – most that still have it have taken down pre-order options

While Deb Aoki reminded us

X-Men Misfits v. 1 made it to the NY Times Bestseller list for several wks

So it was relatively successful, possibly the most successful of Del Rey’s OEL manga line, but as Dave points out, using the X-Men brand can be expensive. And it may be the case that manga fans and X-Men fans are perfectly happy with the options they have and don’t need a blended version.

Update: (4/12/10) The followup to the other Del Rey-licensed Marvel manga, Wolverine: Prodigal Son, has also been cancelled, according to writer Antony Johnston. As he posted,

Unfortunately, the simple truth is that not enough people bought them. Despite WOLVERINE being praised by readers and selected for two library YA lists, despite MISFITS making it onto the New York Times bestseller list, and not least despite all the efforts of Del Rey themselves and our editors there, there just weren’t enough readers to justify the costs. This is, sadly, more common than you might think in comics.

Robot 6 looks at some of the sales data for context for this cancellation decision.

Update 2: The writers’ statement. Here’s an excerpt, click the link for the whole thing:

The saddest part for us is that the story was written as a 2-parter and we set a lot of things up to be played out or resolved in Book 2. We’d have done things VERY differently if we knew there was a chance of this happening. Less foreshadowing and more payoff! We certainly wouldn’t have waited until Book 2 to include Lockheed, that’s for sure! And, because it was work for hire, and the characters are all licensed, there’s no way the rest of the story will ever see the light of day.



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