Tag: Virgin Comics

Scott Timberg takes a look at an exhibit at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art that focuses on comics in the Indian culture from a fine-art perspective.  — Jevon Phillips If you want to understand the meaning of comics in India, one place to start is a battered, chipped piece of sandstone from the 9th century. “Durga Slaying the Buffalo Demon,” in which an eight-armed goddess impales a part-man, part-animal monster, doesn’t bear any obvious resemblance to the X-Men or even the hipster graphic novels of Dan Clowes. But this sculpture carved out of stone for purposes of worship represents an image that echoes through Indian culture — and fuels some of the work created today on computer tablets by companies like Bangalore, India-based Liquid Comics. “You’re going to see visions of Durga all over the place,” says Julie ...

Barry Levine is focused on Hollywood aspirations these days, but he came up in the music world as a photographer for KISS and Mötley Crüe, so he knows a gold rush when he sees one. Crüe was part of the 1980s Sunset Strip metal scene that stirred an industry craze just as Liverpool and San Francisco had done in the 1960s and Seattle would in the 1990s. “Right now in Hollywood, the rush is on, comic books are the new sensation and they are not going away,” Levine said with an insider’s assured nod at he sat in front of a plate of pasta at a Los Angeles sidewalk café. “What’s happened already is impossible to ignore but what’s happening now and what’s going to happen next is even more interesting.” The past-tense statement was a reference to “The Dark ...

Virgin Comics is dead and gone, and a new venture called Liquid Comics is picking up the pieces. If you go to the Virgin Comics website, you will see that the new name is already up and running. This is the news that Virgin editor-in-chief Gotham Chopra was hinting at when I spoke to him a few weeks ago. Virgin arrived on the scene in 2006 and stirred things up with some big ideas (looking to Asia and India specifically for concepts and audience and also tapping Hollywood talent to create comics that could be used as instant templates for film projects) and big names (Sir Richard Branson and Deepak Chopra on the corporate masthead, and Guy Ritchie, John Woo, Ed Burns and Nicolas Cage among its film-world creators, along with comics-industry notables such as Garth Ennis, Alex Ross and ...

I just got off the phone with Gotham Chopra, the chief creative officer and editor-in-chief of Virgin Comics, and he was choosing his words carefully. "Turbulent? Yes, I guess that’s a word for it. Things have been turbulent." Two weeks ago, Virgin put out a brief press release about a "restructuring" of the company, but corporate-speak couldn’t hide the grim reality for the company that made such a splashy debut in 2005: The New York offices were shuttered and the staff of eight there was let go. What a turnaround. It was just in April that Virgin Comics announced a major new initiative with Stan Lee creating a line of superhero titles, and that was just weeks after the company inked a deal with Hugh Jackman to create a series. At Comic-Con International in July, Chopra and his Virgin team ...