Heh. My almost 6 year old daughter is trying to read her first Harry Potter book and relating it to the Lord of the Rings movies and a collection of Icelandic Viking stories we've been reading at bedtime. Dumb things down?

When ever she asks about how something works, I go and start explaining it to her. This has led to morning drive discussions on atomic and molecular theory, talks about the electromagnetic spectrum and the respiratory/circulatory system. Never underestimate what kid can pick up. Sure, her pronunciation is off a lot and she sometimes get terms mixed up but her basic understanding of how the world works and where western culture has come from is fairly solid. I can't wait until I can get all the GG books and we can start in on those. She'll love it!

The American desire to dumb things down is probably why so much of the teen and pre-teen market is moving from cartoons and comics to anime and manga. Of course, the challenge is finding anime and manga that haven't been captured by Big Bidness and dumbed down; thank the gods for DVDs. And TokyoPop, sort of.

Look on the bright side. If you wait a few years, there will surely be a backlash against all the 'baby version' animation. If you've got some preliminaries worked up by then, you could be way ahead of the game.

For now - You do find serious, adult animation in other parts of the world. Have you considered Japan?

Well, first off, if you dumbed it down, it could hardly be Girl Genius, now, could it? ;)

Seriously, keep doing what youre doing the way that youre doing it. Girl Genius is awesome as is, and stands head and shoulders above the crowd. "Marketing experts" alwayss eek to find new ways to make YOUR product identical to everyone ELSES product.

Dont let them!

Keep up the amazing work. Youve got more fans than you know :D

About 14 years ago I read a news story in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution about a cartoon that was being developed: an animated series based on The Rocky Horror Picture Show. The characters would be little kids. All the main characters would be included, despite the Trannies being from another planet. Frank would not be a transvestite, he would be androgynous.

That's the point at which my head exploded. I dare anyone to come up with a more wretched show concept than this.

You know, of all of the baby-x shows mentioned that have actually been made, the only ones that I found watchable were the tiny toon adventures. I think that's because it was written as a next-generation looney toons, not an attempt to invent baby versions of existing characters.

On the other hand, I've recently been watching the animated Teen Titans series and it brought back the fact that the Titans WERE teenagers but that was never made clear at all in the comics. They were always written and drawn as young adults. So, in at least one case I find the youngification not only reasonable, but an improvement. Then again Baby Titans would be terrible, I'm sure.

As an author, you must reach out to your audience. The question is, do you want them to lift them up to your level, or let you drag them down to theirs?

Guess which one is easier, and guess which one your current fans are hoping for....

When I was a Pre-Teen girl, a Teen-girl and a Post-Teen woman for that matter I was desprate for the kind of intelgent fun story I find in G.G. and was both offended and sickined by the insulting dribble Holiwood and book stores kept trying to shove down my throat. So on behalf of those with a brain My Lady I thank ye.
No more Day-glo abortion pleeeeeeese.

I think that's just silly! Besides, what you're doing now is addicting - why change it?

I read GG first when just randomly browsing the 'net. Immedietly got addicted. My brother noticed me reading it. He was addicted. And then the YOUNGER brother got addicted. (He just found out too that you can order the books from your site ... which he has mentioned to me AT LEAST six times now. XD He got vol. 3 for his birthday, much to his gape-jawed amazment).
And NOW, the kid who has been living with us all summer is addicted as well.

Why mess with perfection just because it doesn't sell like stupidity?

~Istra~

Anyone who thinks that success is achieved with the female preteen market (or teen market) by "dumbing it down" clearly thinks that JK Rowling ought to go and rewrite her books, to reference a very recent and very obvious counter-example.

(I mean, personally I was reading Lord of the Rings and Sherlock Holmes at 7, but I am prepared to concede that possibly everyone is not quite as enthusiastic as I was at that age. _Still_.)

And in conclusion -- still reading, still loving.

*clicks on the link*

*brain falters, flashes 'system error' at appearance of 'baby stooges'*

*closes link, takes deep breaths, tries again*

*brain crashes completely at sight of 'Thugaboos' and 'Marvel Babies'*

After total shutdown and rebooting:

Absolutely DO NOT dumb down and babify the product! Most of those 'baby' shows that have already aired aren't worth spit on a stick; the kids get tired of them pretty fast, precisely because they're so dumbed down. The only one that had any staying power was 'Tiny Toons', and that was because it was clear they were the next generation of WB Toons, not babyfied versions of the originals.

Harry Potter was not dumbed down. And how much money has J.K. Rowling made by now? Richer than the Queen of England, ain't she? Yeah, there are parents trying to keep the latest books out of their kids' hands because characters are dying now, but the first few books were being read as bedtime stories for six-year-olds, and HP was more than once credited with reviving interest in printed literature!

But if the licensing gurus are so bloody sure that younger kids are the way to go, then you could do what the makers of Dora the Explorer did. (My daughter's 4, and we've even been buying her DVD's of that show, because it encourages problem-solving and introduces a second language.) Anyway, Dora is a little girl who wears pink and purple most of the time, and while she's extremely popular with little girls, the marketers wanted to pull in the little boys, too. So they introduced Dora's cousin, Diego, who's dedicated to saving wildlife and has some electronic device that's like a kiddie version of a Blackberry, I think. After appearing a few times in Dora's show, they spun Diego off into his own show; I haven't seen it, since it's not on the Noggin channel (commercial-free, and the only one my daughter's allowed to watch unsupervised), but I've seen the ads for it and I imagine that it'll be pretty popular with boys.

I don't think it'll be much of a compromise if from Girl Genius you create a spinoff called Boy Genius, starring young Gilgamesh and his newly-created friend Zoink. And their adventures as they ride around in an earlier version of Castle Wulfenbach, with Von Pinn as the Nanny from Heck and another servant, a minor Spark who works for Klaus, acting as his tutor and father-figure (since Klaus is busy running the whole Barony.)

*pauses, remembers the fanfic thingy* Oh, and just in case your lawyer starts getting nervous again: On the very slim chance you didn't already think of that idea yourself, I hereby sign away and all rights I might possibly somehow have for the "Boy Genius" concept. All yours, gratis, de nada, etc.

P.S. You could also do more one-shot short stories, like "Agatha Heterodyne and the Electric Coffin" and that "Personal Trainer" short. I didn't consider those dumbed down at all, but they're great for introducing the main characters and getting new readers hooked!

For what it's worth, I can't think of anything about GG that I would change if I could. Keep doing what you're doing, it's fantastic. :)

But... chibi agatha and von pinn...! Soooo cute...
/devil's advocate

No, I really couldn't keep up the line of argument.

Would it help it I told you that your comic as it stands has magical powers that stave off brain-rot?

You know, one of the smartest things anyone ever said to me, was what an author friend said about one of her books, "So the marketing department said they didn't know how to market it - and all I could think was, isn't that their job??"

A marketing rep's job isn't to change the story/art to something he likes - it's to figure out how to market the current story/art and do so.

In my opinion you can always tell when a marketing rep has gotten their hands on something - the magic goes out of it.

P.S. Baby Wolverine? - Oh, ick!

As others here have pointed out, the reality is that kids can follow complex things, in fact I think most kids are capable of understanding things more complex than probably the majority of adults, who have become unwilling to use their brains anymore, as thinking makes them uncomfortable.

The problem is that in order to license stuff, YOU have to sell to marketing suits. And they have already decided that THEY KNOW what kids will buy. Girl Genius is probably to complex for them to follow, they're probably not willing to put more than 5 minutes into understanding anything, and they're not willing to admit the possibility that a kid might be able to fathom something that they themselves think is too complex.

I think the dumbing down starts at the suit level and works its way outwards.

The article missed the X-Babies -- which were actually intended as a satire of this concept, as they were created by media mogul Mojo as a marketable replacement for the uncooperative X-Men.

The original Muppet Babies (not the cartoon show, the actual puppets in the movie) were a cute one-shot joke, but they should have stayed that way.

Tiny Toon Adventures was actually remarkably good for what it was, I think at least in part because the characters were 1) original to the series, not younger versions of the adult characters and 2) teenagers, not babies, allowing for a much greater variety of storylines.

Ultimately ... there's a difference between creating something and then marketing it, and creating something for the express purpose of marketing it. Most of these kiddified toons were created to sell toys, not to entertain anyone. When the original idea is a creative endeavor made with honest intent to tell a story, making the most of it after it's completed is no crime.

Actually, I think a cartoon about a young Agatha -- pre-locket, and traveling with her Uncle Barry while building stuff, humming, and using a wider vocabulary than most high school students -- would be pretty kickass.

To put a somewhat apologetic spin on things, it isn't that pre-teen children, male, female or other are dull or incapable of absorbing complex ideas... but that the half-hour cartoon slot is by no means an ideal vehicle for a complex serial. The advertisers (and by extension, the producers) want something that is easy to get into at any point in the series, which mostly limits the complexity of an overarching plot to the minute or so you get before the title splash and the first commercial break. There are certainly exceptions, but most of them are licensed from overseas; those ones have already proven themselves to have legs, and are generally much cheaper to license than to risk money and time developing and animating domestically.

On the topic of baby versions of old licenses... it's not new. Increasingly ahborrent perhaps, but not new. It's almost all follow-the-leader junk, trying to jumpstart or second-guess trends. The relative simplicity of the character designs probably promises to speed the animation process, too. (Speaking of abhorrent, there is no way that the Baby Stooges are going to see the light of day. The character designs are bad enough, but translating the Stooges' classic schticks to infants... eheh. No. Not with the bogeyman that copycat violence is these days.)

Marketing people? Ugh.

I've dealt with enough marketing people to realize that the vast majority of them have no clue how to actually sell something other than what's already successful in the market. They do know, however (and correctly), that if you do something novel, it's very likely not to sell. (Just think, if you invent something new totally at random, odds are, it won't sell, about 1,000,000:1 against. If you do it cleverly instead of randomly, the odds drop to about 10:1 against.)

What they don't tend to admit is that the novel products that are mega-hits generally are the result of random luck in starting a fad, or catching people's interests or needs just right, rather than any kind of marketing genius. Remember pet rocks? Someone's clever idea, just happened to take off. If marketing people really had much of a clue, they'd be richer than Bill Gates (who is actually one of the most effective marketing people in the US, curse him, but he doesn't sell innovative products -- he buys or copies successful ones, and sells them better).

Someone brought up Harry Potter... notice which major marketing-genius US publisher picked that as a sure winner? Right -- none of them, the rights were bought by a publisher which puts out a lot of random, cheap kids books for the school market, and I bet they viewed HP as more of the same. And suddenly they were sitting on a giant cash cow that swamped everything else they've ever done.

Another thing to note -- in the high-tech industry, the big players do their marketing into novel directions by watching all the startups. If any of them are successful in a useful area, SNAP, and they're assimilated. Big companies don't innovate products, since their marketing people can't successfully pick the winners. Easier to let someone else take the risk, and then use your cash reserves to buy the ones that are clearly growing successful. 20/20 hindsight is the key to successful new product lines in big high-techs. (OK, Apple is the exception to this, but they also spent a large part of their corporate career being Wall Street's favorite example of a badly-run high-tech. Now they can do no wrong, proving Wall Street uses the same formula....)

What will make Girl Genius a successful product line (from a large company point of view) is having it be a successful small product, with a significant growth curve. Don't show the suits your product, show them the growth curves in site visitors, cook up some "customer loyalty" measurements somehow, and show them that. They don't care what your product is, just how its doing in the marketplace. If it's got three-digit yearly growth, that will sell them that you've got something. Otherwise it's "nice talking to you, we'll do lunch sometime."

And don't listen to marketing people tell you what to make -- they'll get it wrong 95% of the time, and mostly you'll get just what you got -- "make it just like the most successful product in the market space, only better/cheaper".

---Walter

Two words nobody else has said yet:

'Market saturation'

Which is why I think The West Wing (for instance) managed a respectable prime-time run despite the overwhelming and nauseating trend towards 'reality TV' which is cheaper to make, even with flights to Thailand and stuff. There was never anything like 24 before, either.

So an animated GG about late-teens characters and OMGKlaustheoldguy! [/snark] would stand out from the crowd like a creative lighthouse. You'd get everybody sick of diaper changes.

IMquasi-observantO, of course.

I just got back from Burning Man and got to see Neverwas Haul in the, er, flesh. It was squeeeetastic.

The anal retentive fangirl in me screams at the Marvel Babies. They shouldn't have their mutant abilities! Little Bruce hasn't been exposed to gamma rays yet! Why is he green?! And I suppose Baby Wolverine already had his adamantium inserted by some baby-abusing doctor? o_O WTF?!

Okay, now that that's out of my system...

I must heartily disagree that Girl Genius is too complicated for marketing. Lord of the Rings and new-trilogy Star Wars have complex stories (okay, with LotR, that's an understatement...) and also enjoyed highly successful marketing. Astonishing, mind-boggling, successful marketing. I think the trick is to tailor goods to each audience. Plush Krosp for the kids, replica death ray guns for the adults. I mean, hell, if Lovecraft can be marketed in the form of plush Cthulus, I don't think you'd have a problem. And, really, do you think all the toddlers playing with their Playskool Chibi Palpatines are pondering his intricate plot to subvert democracy and create a totalitarian regime?

I left my 20-something, video game loving boyfriend alone in the same room with two of the trades and he wouldn't put them down until he'd finish and loved every page. He's not a comic reader, at least not like me, but he was talking about getting the first trade after he'd finished. I'd say you've got a story that tends to just grab it's audience by the brain and suck them in! There's a market for anything out there, you've just got to find/make it. ;D

There's no need to compromise your creation. There are worse things than having to eat Spaghetti-O's once in a while.

There are a lot of ways artists deal with these things.

Bill Watterson, of "Calvin and Hobbes," never licensed his characters for anything (everything you see with those characters is a bootleg.) I've got his giant collection, and it's a completed work of art he should be very proud of.

Charles Schultz licensed his characters for almost everything, but to the best of my knowledge, drew every last item himself.

Find what makes you feel right, and don't regret sticking to it.

That being said, my TPU T-shirt has faded out completely, and I guess it's time for a new one...

Just do what the heck you like, Kaja - we love you and we trust you, and we promise to buy all your stuff. ♥

I only have a sample of 2 pre-teen girls readily available ( 9 & 12 ), but they both really like Girl Genius.

SPANC and Greedquest were also popular - I'm hiding some of my other comics quite carefully. *grin*