I recently reread the three volumes of Kat & Mouse, the Tokyopop series about two girls solving mysteries at a snooty new England private school. I’ll say up front, I think canceling it (and leaving major plots unsolved) was a very bad idea, considering that it’s a terrific book to push to fans of things like Gossip girl or similar stories of class-based plots among the school-age set.

However, its odd format — not manga-sized, but half that length, for $6 a book — was, in my opinion, a major detriment to reaching any audience. It’s a lot more expensive than a normal comic, but it doesn’t appear at first glance to be a better value to justify the price.

Anyway, once I reached the end and found myself wondering what was intended to happen, I made a decision to ask author Alex de Campi about it, and she was kind enough to share her thoughts on the title, working with Tokyopop, and whether we’ll ever see the conclusion. Here’s a short interview with her about the book.

Q: how did Kat & mouse come to Tokyopop? who came up with the idea?

A: I just cold-emailed Tokyopop when I was starting out and they were beginning their OEL initiative. I’ve always loved teen/high school drama, and I wanted to write stories that had the appeal of Nancy Drew, but felt modern… and didn’t shy away from portraying just how dreadful kids can be to each other in 7th and 8th grade. I also wanted to write about girls, as there were so few good comic books for/about girls. I wanted to write the stories the 12-year-old me wanted to read. and I was furious about that Harvard president’s comment about how girls were genetically no good at science and math. Dude, Marie Curie is so going to come back from the dead and salt your Viagra with radium for that, you sad old git. (I am a feminist. GO team X CHROMOSOME!)

So everything about Kat & mouse was entirely my idea, except for the character designs which are undoubtedly Federica’s. The pitch went to mark Paniccia first, and while he was keen on it, he didn’t think it could get authorized without it being a lot more “manga”. Yeah, I know — teen school drama/romance/mystery, already a massive manga genre in Japan. like Tokyopop had never shifted lots of copies of a book called Mars…. but I vow to God, they were pushing me so hard to put a talking cat or a vampire in it, as that was what “manga” indicated to them. I was like, “uh, thanks, interesting idea but NO.” I stuck to my guns, found Federica as an artist, and the project was finally authorized on the basis of (shock!) it being a good story.

Mark left during the process to go to Marvel. I later had interesting adventures with him choosing a desperately improper artist for a mooted marvel teen-girl series for me, which resulted in me walking off the series…. and marvel realising that Paniccia had forgotten to get me to sign either a contract or an NDA for the series so I still owned the script. That was fun.

In any case, back at Tokyopop on Kat & Mouse, I then inherited Tim Beedle and Carol Fox as editors and I couldn’t have been happier. What a terrific pair of people they were. Intelligent, hardworking, and not terrified of the dirty service of telling me (or Federica) “you could do better”. I think I stayed with Tokyopop so long because of Tim and Carol. I just can’t say enough good things about them as human beings and as editors.

Q: Kat & mouse appeared in a kind of hybrid format, shorter than the manga digest Tokoypop popularized, at a $6 price point. Was that format planned from the beginning? Do you think it assisted or hurt the project?

A: Oh heavens. It killed the project stone cold dead in the market. It looked too wimpy and kiddie for its audience, and if you racked it spine-out, it just vanished. Plus, the normal Tokyopop no-marketing-support-unless-it’s-Princess-Ai. and no, it wasn’t planned from the beginning. When they told me they authorized the project, they then sprung the whole 90-page thing on me. considering my plot outlines had written for 160-180 pages, I was shocked and disappointed — but I didn’t feel like there was anything I could do.

Here it is: Tokyopop always felt like it was flailing around with no sense of purpose or long-term strategy, and they would spin out these silly jelly-at-the-wall ideas on a regular basis rather than just knuckle down and focus on great stories, well-marketed. When they launched Manga readers or whatever that little format was called, they were all “we will get this in the YA section of bookstores!” Um, did they? Did they heck. They also didn’t follow up with any marketing outside the comics world. I remember speaking to one of their marketing people and going, hey, have we tried to get this examined in some newspapers’ kids book sections? Can you show me what reviews you’ve handled to get for the book? and they were completely flummoxed. They ummed and ahhed and then asked me if I desired a complimentary pass to Brisnullnull