Comic Critique: Year In Review Awards

Comic Critique recently released their Year In Review awards, and we’re proud to announce that Virgin Comics was well represented. We’re especially excited about winning the Rookie Juggernaut Award!

Rookie Juggernaut Award: Virgin Comics

If we’re nearing an Indian Century then a Virgin Age of Comics will fit right in. Grounded in the culture of the country the world is watching and wise to the essence of comics quality, the folkloric goldmine and pantheon of talent this company had to draw on positioned it well for an extensive young line of non-spandex adventures that feel both rooted and refreshing. Few imprints have offered so much diversity so fast, from the Val Lewton-esque ancient-curse tragedy Snake Woman and the metaphysical martial-arts saga The Sadhu to the resourceful comedic Matrix variation Walk In, the vampire war-comic Virulents, the geopolitical thrillers 7 Brothers and Gamekeeper, the Prohibition melodrama Dock Walloper and more. Started by badboy billionaire Richard Branson and heavily involving maverick mystic Deepak Chopra, the company’s got a compelling story to tell behind the scenes too.

Colorist of the Year: Mukesh Singh

We’re in a golden age of comics colorists — the ease and capacity of computers allow for a lot of automatic and anonymous perfection, but innovators like Dave Stewart, Lee Loughridge, Michelle Madsen and Laura Allred have harnessed high technology for true personality and possibility. Even in this company artist-colorist Mukesh Singh took a leap in a clearly new direction on Virgin Comics’ Gamekeeper. Painted comics typically don’t escape the single-image stasis of the old pulp and paperback covers they seem to homage, but if, as has rightly been said, Gene Colan “paints with a pencil,” Singh drew with a paintbrush, fully working up his line with a rare kinetic fluidity and suffusing scenes with cinematic color fields which materialized moods and transported characters (and readers) in ways that made the most of the medium’s devices while never seeming to manipulate their effects.

And the multi-talented writer of Dock Walloper won the Inker of the Year…

Inker of the Year: Jimmy Palmiotti

There’s all the artists who ink themselves, or digitally reproduce their pencils and paints. Then there’s Palmiotti, period. No inker has ever preserved and reinforced the strengths of so diverse a range of artists’ styles, at such volume and quality. Why do we even have the category anymore?

This was the icing on the cake for what was a tremendous year for Virgin Comics. We launched a joint imprint with SCI FI Channel (The Stranded was the first release), Guy Ritchie’s Game Keeper and Virulents are now in development with Warner Brothers and Fox, respectively, and Sony Online Entertainment is turning our Ramayan 3392AD franchise into a massive multiplayer online video game. All in all, a good year!

We have a lot of exciting plans for 2008. Stay tuned… you’re not going to want to miss this!!!

Blood, Guts, and Terrorists… Oh My!

Okay, I’m not going to pretend that our new book Virulents (see trailer link below) is going to change literature as we know it, but there is a discussion emerging around it from those that have read it or heard the movie pitch evolving from the book. The summary: two military units, one American and one Indian, collide in the Bermuda triangle-like region of Afghanistan (amidst the mountainous Hindu Kush), and are forced to team up when they confront a terrorist-cum-demon. The demon, however, has an unlikely characteristic that makes him an enemy like none these warriors have ever seen. Ultimately, when they start to understand the local lore and the enemy they are up against, they realize there is only one out…

The comic is actually conceived out of an indigenous myth—the story of the blood demon Raktaveej that terrorized the Gods so that they were forced to summon the Goddess Uma who transformed herself into the fearsome Kali to once and for all take care of his menace. There are many morals to the story, some of which, as mentioned, have made their way into ours and feel particularly relevant to the times we find ourselves in.

Namely: be wary of the wars you start and know thy enemy. Today, we’re mired in a war and engaged with an enemy that we clearly don’t fully understand or know how to overcome. We’ve demonized the enemy with the title of terrorist without fully comprehending their powers. We’ve failed to understand that for every one of them that we think we’ve destroyed, we’ve seeded a thousand more (this has direct relevance to the story). And worst of all we’ve convinced ourselves —with the help of suits that work for corporations like Halliburton and Blackwater—that if we stay the course and rely on our archaic American military tradition of more might, we’ll somehow triumph. Ever heard of Gore Vidal’s Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace?

We don’t expect to change the world with our comics. Okay… maybe we do a little. Virulents is full of blood and guts and lives off of the tagline: “What’s the one thing worse than terrorists? Vampire terrorists!!!” And the fact that it’s built upon an actual legend of the East is lost on most readers, as are some of the other implications integrated throughout it. But that doesn’t mean they don’t exist or that they are not worth talking about. After all, that’s what great literature is all about…☺

Gotham Chopra
Chief Creative Officer
Virgin Comics

VIRULENTS TRAILER