Deepak Chopra And a New Age Of Comic Books

Are the young men who swarm events like N.Y. Comic Con snapping up issues of Devi and 7 Brothers? Unclear. The company won't release sales numbers, and though a trickle of fans bought Virgin merchandise, the crowd over the weekend seemed more focused on people like Dawn Mostow. A natural-born exhibitionist, she bought a ticket to the show and came decked out in the sort of va-va-voomy dress worn by Leeloo, a character in the 1997 movie "The Fifth Element."

"I've worn this for 10 years," says Mostow, posing for some onlookers, a cup of coffee incongruously dangling in one hand. "I'm going to wear it for as long as I can."

On a nearby stage, there were performances by the Geek Comedy Tour 3000, featuring a lineup of yuksters telling excruciating "Battlestar Galactica" jokes. They alternated with N.Y. Jedi, a troupe of fully grown adults dressed in "Star Wars" costumes for elaborately staged and totally un-ironic light-saber brawls.

"We rehearse a couple times a week," says a Jedi who calls himself "Master Nova" and wore a homemade brown tunic.

These, of course, are people who were frequently beaten up in high school. And they are a coveted crowd. For media companies, the point of events like this is to pitch the vanguard of geekdom on the latest movies, video games, television shows, comic books and graphic novels. If these crazy kids like it, they'll hit the Internet and spread the word.

In the comic book biz, that means winning over mavens at sites like Newsarama and Silver Bullet Comics, where comics are reviewed and hashed over in forums. Some upbeat things have been said online about Virgin, but even with the wind of good buzz at your back, the comic business is teeny-weeny compared with what it used to be.

It's one of the oddest boom-bust stories ever. In the early '90s, popular titles were selling upward of a million copies per month. But many of those buyers weren't fans; they were speculators. New titles were so sought after that their prices would often triple right after they were published. So people would buy nine copies of the new Batman -- one to read, eight to sell later on.

"I call them the insanity years," says Al Stoltz, owner of Basement Comics and one of more than a dozen retailers with booths at Comic Con.

Inevitably, the bottom fell out. Thousands of comics-only stores closed and circulation evaporated. Today, a title that sells 100,000 copies a month is considered a blockbuster. Five thousand copies a month is far more common.

At $2.99 a pop, that's no road to riches. For Virgin, keeping the cineplex in mind is a way to make a bundle in a business that doesn't make a lot of bundles anymore. And though it's hard to get your head around the idea of Deepak Chopra as a comic-book-slash-film tycoon, he says the response from fanboys, as serious comic fans are known, has been positive.

"Their first reaction to me is 'Cool, man!' " says Chopra. "So it's all fine."