Better late than never, I guess!

More fun, less fiber at Minx.
The basic impulse behind DC’s Minx imprint was a noble one: create a line of comics that would appeal to young female readers. Though DC drafted some top-notch talent for its first Minx titles, the results were decidedly mixed, producing one entertaining book (The Re-Gifters), one middling book (Good As Lily), and two very pedestrian ones (Clubbing, The Plain J.A.N.E.S.). The biggest problem with these early Minx offerings was that they wore their literary aspirations on their sleeves, trying too hard to be the graphic novel equivalents of Judy Blume. Most of the titles were earnest and dull, with teens speaking in the slightly stilted patois of Dawson’s Creek and The OC as they fumbled their way to Very Important Life Lessons. No wonder many teenage girls continued to beat a path to the Borders manga aisle instead of seeking out Minx books at the local comic book store. My suggestion to DC is to stop treating Minx like a prestige project, cranking out respectable books that parents won’t mind buying for their teens—focus on making the books fun.

Fewer attempts to retell the classics in graphic novel form.
I don’t mind comics in the classroom—there’s ample evidence that comics can help a variety of students become more proficient readers. My curmudgeonly side is less enthusiastic, however, about the growing number of publishers hawking graphic novels as tools for teaching teens the classics. These pow-n-splat editions of Great Books prove just how difficult it can be to capture the poetry and mystery of the original works when you boil them down to plot—the least difficult element of Shakespeare or Homer for readers to grasp. And if the artwork isn’t good… well, anyone who’s ever lived with a teenager knows that high school students are quick to reject whatever doesn’t meet their platonic ideal of coolness or authenticity, especially if adults are calling it hip. (Or worse: manga.)

A moratorium on Spider Man movies.
The third Spider Man movie was a tedious, loud affair that ran too long, featured too many villains, and touched on too many iconic plotlines to give any of them satisfactory treatment. Even Rosemary Harris’s expert line-readings and Bruce Campbell’s deliciously obnoxious cameo couldn’t redeem this overstuffed turkey. Best to let this franchise lie fallow for a few years before making another movie… preferably with a new director.

And while we’re at it…
Let’s declare a moratorium on X-Men movies and movies based on C-list Marvel properties.

More funding and publicity for CMX.
Pssssst, DC… you already have a line of comics that appeal to girls: CMX! If you invested half the money and promotional energy in CMX that you do in Minx, you might be pleasantly surprised by the results. As commentators around the mangasphere have noted, the CMX catalog boasts some amazing titles, from old-school shojo like Swan, Moon Child, Cipher, and From Eroica With Love to kid-friendly fare like Chikyu Misaki and The Palette of 12 Secret Colors. But if you’re not making an obvious effort to promote them, how will the Fruits Basket crowd know that there are other titles besides Vampire Knight, Kare Kano, and Fall in Love Like a Comic? Take a page from the Go! Comi playbook and try some fun, creative, inexpensive strategies for building brand loyalty and increasing awareness of the CMX catalog: Fan art and poetry contests. Forums for discussing CMX products. Unusual giveaways. Fan-friendly panels at conventions. (Translation: give the Wildstorm folks their own separate forum for interacting with Ex Machina fans.)

Bring out your dead…
Now that the manga market has matured—and there are readers hungry for the kind of weird, edgy, WTF?! stuff that Viz and Dark Horse licensed five or ten years ago—I’d like to encourage publishers to revisit past under-performers with an eye towards reissuing them. Topping my list of titles I’d like to see in 2.0 versions: Clover, Rumic Theater, and What’s Michael. Given how beautiful the original presentation of Clover was, I think Tokyopop would be wise to reissue it as a four-volume box set (as it had planned to do in 2006 before dropping the project), while Rumic Theater and What’s Michael seem better suited to the omnibus treatment. I don’t need bells and whistles on any of these editions, though I wouldn’t mind seeing them issued with the artwork unflipped and, in the case of Clover, the translation refreshed. A new font for the lettering would also be most welcome—the original edition is typeset in what looks like Times New Roman.

More Tezuka, Toume, and old-school shojo.
I must have been good last year, because Santa rewarded me with a big-ticket item from my 2007 wish list: a new edition of Black Jack, courtesy of Vertical, Inc. That news has made me greedy for titles such as Kei Toume’s The Hour of the Mice and Fuguruma Memories, as well as shojo classics The Rose of Versailles, The Song of the Wind in the Trees, The Poe Family, and Princess Knight. What would really make my heart sing, however, is an English language edition of Ludwig B., Tezuka’s final project. Though Tezuka intended Ludwig B. to be sprawling, panoramic portrait of Beethoven and his times, Tezuka only completed two volumes before his death. It’s a pity he didn’t start the project earlier, as its superb layouts, vivid Viennese street scenes, and glorious images of Beethoven at the piano need no translation for music lovers to enjoy. Pair it with some CDs, and you might just have a bitchin’ music appreciation book that captures the spirit of the Classical style, if not all the historical details. No doubt Charles Rosen would approve, though he might not know what to make of the nekomimi in volume two.

Save titles from licensing limbo.
With so many series debuting each year, it’s inevitable that many won’t post sales figures big enough to justify their continued publication. But when it’s a title I love… well, I become a crusader, forgetting that manga publishers are in business to make money, not please (almost) middle-aged fangirls. Three titles that I’d love to see rescued from licensing limbo are Ai Morinaga’s Duck Prince (CPM), Masato Kobayashi’s Club 9 (Dark Horse), and Hiroshi Hirata’s Satsuma Gishiden (Dark Horse). Of the three, Duck Prince seems like the most likely candidate for a license rescue, perhaps by Tokyopop. As for the other two… there’s a snowball’s chance in hell of seeing the full run of either. I just have to accept that unpleasant truth.

Better mainstream coverage of comics.
I’d been struggling to pull together my thoughts on the subject when Tom Spurgeon and David Welsh posted thoughtful critiques of the comics coverage in Newsweek, The New York Times, and Entertainment Weekly. I don’t have much to add to the discussion, though I can think of two suggestions for big-city papers interested in covering comics.

First, stop ghettoizing comic reviews and best-of lists to your websites. We still live in a world where “print” equals “prestige,” and when you can’t be bothered to give regular print space to comics, you send the message that comics just aren’t as important as the other media you cover. Second, don’t confine your reviews to literary comics (i.e. Shortcomings) and event comics (i.e. Civil War); try to cover a more representative sampling of the market. If you applied the same selection criteria to determining which movies, books, and TV shows to review, your Arts & Leisure section would be mighty slim indeed. (And given how miserable your high culture coverage can be, you can’t claim to be taking the aesthetic high road by thumbing your nose at Death Note.)

So that’s my wish list for 2008. Many thanks to the bloggers and readers who made 2007 a great year for us at PopCultureShock. Here’s to an even better 2008!