The comics racket is a tough one -- or, as Variety puts it in a bizarre moment of Coen-channeling when discussing Virgin's entry into the field a few years back, it is "a rocky place where their seeds could find no purchase". (Comics2Film adds the unwelcome phrasing that the company was "inseminated with funds from Richard Branson's media empire". Those guys really need to get out more.) After several largely fruitless years of attempting to steal market share away from the bigwigs at Marvel and DC -- and signing a deal with ex-Marvel boss Stan Lee to develop a line of properties for them that went nowhere -- Virgin Comics has finally realized what everyone else in the business already knows: that the real money in comics doesn't come from the books themselves, but from farming out their characters as properties to be used in Hollywood blockbusters. In aid of this, they're shuttering their New York office and moving the whole operation to L.A.
Branson insists that the comics wing isn't shutting down, it's simply reorganizing as a development company; but that's just typical business boilderplate. What should truly concern us here are the various bits of trivia concealed deep within the article, where the author clearly hoped we would not notice them: the fact that Virgin's "Hollywood development deals" for their characters are almost all slotted for release on the Sci-Fi Channel as opposed to an actual movie theatre, and feature such blockbuster properties as "Guy Ritchie's The Gamekeeper" and "Ed Burns' Dock Walloper"; the fact that, despite deals being inked all over town, not a single Virgin Comics film or TV production has actually been made; and the boffo news that Branson's partner in the venture is Deepak Chopra's son Gotham -- as in Gotham City, home of the Batman -- which likely explains the commonly cited reason for the comics line's failure, that it focuses on stories involving relatively obscure Indian mythology.
Still, the company has some real talent signed, from well-liked comics writer Mike Carey to porn star Jenna Jameson to Stan the Man himself. Time will tell if Virgin Comics can develop any of those signings into decent movies and/or TV shows, but this morning, Branson has to be wishing the entire venture didn't sound so much like a bad nepotistic joke in an inside-Hollywood parody.