Deepak Chopra And a New Age Of Comic Books
Author Is in Venture to Create Made-for-Movies Superheroes

By David Segal
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, March 3, 2007

NEW YORK -- For connoisseurs of nerd culture, N.Y. Comic Con is a feast: 30,000 attendees flying their geek flags, some dressed in sci-fi movie costumes, others waiting in line for the guy who drew X-Men comics back when they, like, totally ruled in the '90s.

"Chris Claremont is the greatest artist ever," says Pedro Vega, taking a couple of deep breaths and holding freshly signed comics in his hands. "I'm sort of trembling."

For sheer head-scratching weirdness, though, nothing at the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center last weekend could match the exhibit booth for a company called Virgin Comics. The place was low on gaudy outfits, but it was selling a new line of comic books with one of the genre's strangest credit lines ever.

"Chief visionary: Deepak Chopra."

Yes, that Deepak Chopra, the tranquillity-peddling New Age author of more than 40 books, with titles like "Grow Younger, Live Longer: 10 Steps to Reverse Aging" and "The Path to Love: Spiritual Strategies for Healing." The guy is a mind-medicine smoothie for the Oprah set. What is he doing in a genre that (a) targets young men, and (b) is filled with pain and ultra-violence and a whole lot of "Thwackkkk"?

Luckily, the dapper Sharad Devarajan was on hand to explain. Devarajan is Virgin Comics' 32-year-old CEO, and two years ago he teamed with Chopra's son, a 32-year-old former TV correspondent and comic book story editor named Gotham Chopra. Gotham recruited his dad.

"The guy is a best-selling fiction writer and a great storyteller," says Devarajan. Deepak apparently loves the mythology of superheroes, and he signed on with Virgin Comics hoping to reach beyond the ladies-over-30 crowd that adores him.

The company isn't a regular old comic book mill. What Virgin has in mind is a whole new take on Hollywood's time-tested relationship with the comic biz. Until now, successful comic-to-film franchises, like "Spider-Man" and "X-Men," started with characters and plots conceived by comic book artists. Those stories are acquired by studios, which then shop for well-known directors.

But what if you went first to the directors? What if you asked, say, John Woo -- whose films include "Face/Off" and "Mission: Impossible II" -- to dream up his own characters and yarns? You turn that idea into a comic, and even if it doesn't catch on with the kids, you've got a nifty little storyboard, the perfect pitch for a studio.

"We're in the idea business," says Devarajan, who wears his hair slicked back and sounds like a graduate of Columbia Business School, which he is. "We're essentially using comics as a springboard, to games, to movies, to animation. Publishing is just one way to monetize our research and design laboratory."

The company went looking for investors and found a stinking-rich one in Richard Branson, the Virgin Music mogul, who chipped in enough to get the company renamed. (It had been known as Gotham, which started off selling translations of Marvel and DC Comics in India. ) The company has since recruited Woo, who dreamed up a series called 7 Brothers, about a "motley crew of so-called brothers and a power too terrifying to use," as the company describes it. Guy Ritchie, of "Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels" fame, will release the first issue of Game Keeper in March. (It's the story of a man who . . . well, judging from a preview issue, a man who shoots a lot of people.) Also in the roster is Shekhar Kapur, who directed "Elizabeth" and is a Virgin Comics partner. He has two titles, Devi and Snake Woman, both rooted in Indian stories.

"I as a director have so much more control if it's first in a comic," says Kapur, talking from London. "It's my idea. A studio can look at it, and I can tell them, 'It's gone this far,' and that way I'll keep my vision, much more so than I would if I went to a studio and said, 'Let's make a movie about a snake woman.' "

So far, none of these titles has led to movie-deal magic, but it's early, says Devarajan. The first Virgin title was released in July. If a Variety-worthy sale is ever made, the company has partnership arrangements with the director, the details of which the partners would not get into. Though no contracts have been inked, Deepak Chopra has already written a screenplay for a movie version of the Sadhu, a Virgin title about India's answer to the samurai.

"Nicolas Cage is totally on board," Chopra says by phone.

* * *

Chopra is outside a Coffee Bean in Santa Monica, Calif., where he's drinking a cup of coffee containing two scoops of white chocolate powder. ("It's my own concoction," he says.) He sounds like a guy living the sweet life. He's just come from a two-hour workout, which included weight training and yoga, and he's taking the rest of the day off.

As he tells it, he isn't in this comics thing just to make a few bucks off a major motion picture. No, he's thinking way bigger than that. He believes comic books can bridge cultural gaps, including the yawning maw that stands between the United States and its enemies.

"Kids all over the world are reading comic books," he says, "and if we could create a transcultural hero that appeals to kids in countries like Iran and Syria, that could have a huge impact. We've even made a proposal to the State Department to study celebrity heroes in Islamic countries and make superheroes out of them. It's a good way -- "

Wait, you called the State Department?

"Yes."

What did they say?

"We had a conference call, and I think they were very receptive. Iran right now, more than 60 percent of the population is under 25. I think we should try to figure out how to capture the collective imagination of this new generation and see if we can get out of this old us-versus-them paradigm."

For the moment, though, Virgin is focused on winning over American comics readers. Which might be a tough sell. Virgin and its Hollywood-focused strategy have met with some arched eyebrows. It's a little redolent of focus group testing, says one competitor, who had a booth at Comic Con and didn't want to be named because he didn't have anything nice to say.

"The great stories come from artists who tell stories that they have to tell," he says. "If you start with a movie in mind, you're just not going to wind up with the same thing."

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."