The Screengrab

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. 

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As one of the few defenders of Ang Lee's 2003 Hulk – and as someone who picked The Incredible Hulk to be the biggest bomb of this summer – I readily admit to having some preconceived notions about Transporter director Louis Leterrier's take on the latest Marvel comics adaptation. This would be the part where I tell you how pleasantly surprised I was to be proven wrong…but unfortunately, that didn't happen.

The big question all along about The Incredible Hulk has been: What is it? Is it a sequel to the Ang Lee movie? A remake? It's sort of neither, which turns out to be the cleverest aspect of Leterrier's movie.

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Recently, our own Phil Nugent took a look at the debut of Marvel Studios, the big-screen production arm of the comics company behind Spider-Man, the Hulk, and the Fantastic Four.  While Marvel's been taking a critical beating lately with its flagship comics, losing retail ground to longtime rival DC, the opposite has been the case in the multiplex:  Marvel's aggressive approach and multifaceted marketing has proven to be a success at the box office, and as a rule, Marvel's properties have outperformed DC's and brought in piles of cash for the company.   

One of the reasons that Marvel became such a hit amongst comics fans in the 1960s was its 'multiverse' approach; unlike DC, which at the time told all their stories in a disconnected, separate manner, Marvel ran with the pretense that all their stories were taking place in the same world, at the same time, and pushed the idea that any one of their characters could show up in any of their titles.  Fans took to the idea that all the stories were connected, that all the pieces mattered, and that what happened in one book made a difference in other books.  The idea that the world of the Marvel Universe was unified and that the storytellers were actually creating pieces of a whole was so appealing that DC was forced to adopt it as an editorial policy for their own characters.  

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With Iron Man looking to be a runaway success, Marvel Comics' film production arm is naturally looking to capitalize on the box office take to move ahead with production on future superhero franchises.  So what comic book superhero is next for the House of Ideas?  How about...all of them?

In its quarterly earnings report, Marvel discloses (among other things, including that it made enough money this year to buy Stan Lee a Silver Surfer-themed iron lung) that it's in the process of developing a boatload of new multimedia projects for release in the next four years.  In addition to a plethora of video games, TV shows, animated series and direct-to-DVD animated features, Marvel Film -- the company's in-house production unit -- has scheduled for release The Incredible Hulk, an Iron Man sequel, a Thor movie, a Captain America solo adventure, an Avengers team picture, and, of all things, a feature film starring perennial sad-sack second-stringer Ant-Man.  (We're hoping that this one sticks to the current comics approach to the character and plays as straight-up satire.)  In addition to all of that, Marvel has two licensed properties set to release in the next year:  a Punisher sequel, entitled War Zone, is releasing through Lionsgate this Christmas, and an X-Men prequel, entitled Wolverine, drops a year from now through Fox.  All that, and no Dr. Strange?  I guess no one wants to take on the supreme challenge of out-acting Peter Hooten.

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A long time ago when the world made sense, there were two kinds of comic books: DC comics and Marvel comics. And while Marvel reigned supreme at the comics shop, the company dearly wanted to break into the lucrative and ego-stroking business of licensing it characters for major motion pictures, and it was there that DC pantsed Marvel and took its lunch money. While DC was the home of Superman and Batman, Marvel was the home base of Howard the Duck. For years, Marvel's role in the Hollywood fod chain was epitomized by the 1994 Fantastic Four movie, a cheesy, cheap-looking affair that Marvel put into production without bothering to inform the people who worked on it that they had no intention of releasing it to theaters or even home video but were contractually obliged to make something if they wanted to hang onto the film rights to their own characters. All that started to change in 2000 with Bryan Singer's X-Men, whose success the director was unable to duplicate with his later stab at rebooting Superman. A couple of years later, Sam Raimi's take on the Marvel flagship hero Spider-Man launched a major franchise and proved that Marvel could sire a blockbuster movie without Singer or Hugh Jackman modeling a haircut that could open bottles and cans.

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