In what is definitely looking to be a bad season for manga lovers, DC has announced that it will be shutting down its manga line CMX after six years.
The small but sturdy manga imprint had developed a loyal audience among readers, particularly for such girl reader friendly series like Kaoru Mori’s Victorian romance Emma. As a comics line, CMX never seemed to receive the same amount of promo attention from DC’s bigwigs as its other imprints – as manga blogger David Welch has pointed out, it was barely mentioned whenever the company’s publisher gave a state of the company address – so this lack of support during a hard time for booksellers everywhere isn't a shock. Still, with the company’s blink-and-you-missed-it girl friendly Minx Line getting zip in the way of long-term support, it’s clear that the company has put most of its stock in dark fanboy friendly superhero fare and turned away from a more diverse readership.
Which is not to say that CMX’s material was all girlish shojo fare — one of its recent intriguing titles was Yunosuke Yoshinaga’s violent, mature readers fantasy Rampage, after all. But it does hint that, per company bottom dollar, in-house superhero series that can potentially seed mega-bux movie franchises will received more corporate love than a small line of paperbacks featuring material owned and produced overseas. For comics readers who believe that the art form as a whole can only benefit from having a wide range of material available to fans and potential future artists, this development is not a happy one.
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