Scott Timberg takes a look at an exhibit at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art that focuses on comics in the Indian culture from a fine-art perspective.  -- Jevon Phillips

If you want to understand the meaning of comics in India, one place to start is a battered, chipped piece of sandstone from the 9th century. "Durga Slaying the Buffalo Demon," in which an eight-armed goddess impales a part-man, part-animal monster, doesn't bear any obvious resemblance to the X-Men or even the hipster graphic novels of Dan Clowes.

But this sculpture carved out of stone for purposes of worship represents an image that echoes through Indian culture -- and fuels some of the work created today on computer tablets by companies like Bangalore, India-based Liquid Comics.

"You're going to see visions of Durga all over the place," says Julie Romain, the curator at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art who organized the new show. "In both traditional and popular form -- movies, posters, comics."

She sees Durga and others as archetypes, figures that replicate through Indian society. The show, "Heroes and Villains: The Battle for Good in India's Comics," which runs through Feb. 7, looks at the transformative power of the imagery of Indian mythology: figures such as Durga, an often vengeful mother goddess who is one of several forms of India's supreme goddess Devi, as well as Rama, an avatar of Vishnu, and the mace-wielding monkey god Hanuman. (Though India is religiously diverse, most of the figures in the show come out of the Hindu tradition.)

Romain is not a fangirl but a scholar of classical Indian art, albeit one married to a comic-book lover going through what she calls a nostalgic period.

The show of 54 pieces she put together with paintings curator Tushara Bindu Gude is not comprehensive -- it doesn't look at the entirety of Indian comics and does not explicitly connect the images to the rest of Indian pop culture, whether Bollywood films or contemporary graphic design....

THERE'S MORE, READ THE REST

-- Scott Timberg

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Barry Levine is focused on Hollywood aspirations these days, but he came up in the music world as a photographer for KISS and Mötley Crüe, so he knows a gold rush when he sees one. Crüe was part of the 1980s Sunset Strip metal scene that stirred an industry craze just as Liverpool and San Francisco had done in the 1960s and Seattle would in the 1990s.

“Right now in Hollywood, the rush is on, comic books are the new sensation and they are not going away,” Levine said with an insider’s assured nod at he sat in front of a plate of pasta at a Los Angeles sidewalk café. “What’s happened already is impossible to ignore but what’s happening now and what's going to happen next is even more interesting.”

The past-tense statement was a reference to “The Dark Knight,” “Iron Man,” "Hancock," “Wanted” and other 2008 comic-book films that have been piling up box office receipts that, collectively, are astounding. “The Dark Knight” alone is closing in on a billion dollars in ticket sales and may even end up as the first comic-book movie to fly high at the Oscars.

The interesting future, according to Levine, is on the way because Hollywood players are climbing over each other for comic-book properties, both famous and obscure, like gamblers trying to pump coins into the same slot machine. Levine is taking a different approach –- he’s built his own slot machine.

Levine is co-founder of Radical Publishing, a company that began publishing comics this year with sleek production values and the proud agenda of treating every comic book as if it is a storyboard for a film that’s just waiting to be made. Some people make pitches in Hollywood, Levine hands out comic books.

I have to say, the guy seems to have a pretty good sensibility for the contemporary cinematic version of the fantastic; the comics he is putting out sound like movies. There’s “Caliber,” the tale of King Arthur reimagined as an Old West adventure where the magic sword is replaced with a six-shooter and Merlin is a Native American shaman; the future police-state tale “City of Dust,” a sort of tricked-out “Blade Runner” channeling of George Orwell's thought-crime fears; and a bloody take on “Hercules,” where the embittered man-god runs with an ancient, all-star mercenary group, a sort of “300” version of “The Magnificent Seven.”

Yes, at Radical it’s all high concept, all the time. And Hollywood is paying attention.

Peter Berg, director of “Hancock” and “The Kingdom,” has a deal in place to produce and direct that grim version of “Hercules” for the screen, while Johnny Depp’s production company, Infinitum Nihil, is on board for a “Caliber” adaptation that has John Woo ("Face/Off") attached as director. Bryan Singer, the director of “X-Men” and “The Usual Suspects,” has signed on to produce an adaptation of “Freedom Formula,” a Radical title about racing teams in the wastelands of the far future. For comics fans, too, Radical has brought in notable creators, among them top horror writer Steve Niles ("30 Days of Night" and "Criminal Macabre") and Jim Steranko, one of the more celebrated and influential artists during the Marvel Comics glory days.

“These are very exciting times for us,” Levine said, patting a stack of the comic books Radical has produced in its first year of publishing. Exciting, yes, but then the roulette table is always exciting while the wheel is still spinning.

Virgin Comics is dead and gone, and a new venture called Liquid Comics is picking up the pieces.

If you go to the Virgin Comics website, you will see that the new name is already up and running. This is the news that Virgin editor-in-chief Gotham Chopra was hinting at when I spoke to him a few weeks ago.

Virgin arrived on the scene in 2006 and stirred things up with some big ideas (looking to Asia and India specifically for concepts and audience and also tapping Hollywood talent to create comics that could be used as instant templates for film projects) and big names (Sir Richard Branson and Deepak Chopra on the corporate masthead, and Guy Ritchie, John Woo, Ed Burns and Nicolas Cage among its film-world creators, along with comics-industry notables such as Garth Ennis, Alex Ross and Mike Carey).

The venture was met with considerable interest and some cynicism (Alan Moore, for instance, took a thinly disguised swipe at Virgin here not long ago and essentially called it everything that was wrong with a Hollywood-obsessed comics industry). The formula certainly grabbed the attention of some Hollywood folks, who had watched the Dark Horse success story and believed that a small but nimble comic-book company could not only be a dynamic Hollywood player, it could in essence publish movie storyboards.

I talked to filmmaker Ritchie about this a year ago and he was intensely interested in the notion of writing a story, realizing it visually on a comic book page and then using that as project pitch and visual guide to a movie. The "Snatch" director told me that "Gamekeeper," his series for Virgin, became a hot commodity before it was even printed. "The irony," he said, "is there has been more interest in this from movie studios than anything I ever did before." But, in the end, it was money matters in the greater Virgin empire that forced the closure of the comic-book company's New York offices early this month.

I exchanged e-mails this morning with Gotham Chopra (who is the son of author Deepak) and he told me about some other things coming up that I will be able to share with you soon. Essentially, though, my sense is that he, publisher Sharad Devarajan and their team have lost the corporate backing of Branson's sprawling Virgin empire (which is grappling with the grim financial realities of the day) but that they were in comic-book  business before they had Branson as a partner and they will solider now without the British conglomerate.

The question now is how all this will directly or indirectly affect a number of projects underway (such as the "Ramayan 3392" video game with Sony, the partnership with the Sci Fi Channel and "Virulents," the movie property that director John Moore wants to make as his follow-up to "Max Payne").

Stay tuned ...

-- Geoff Boucher

Images from issues of Virgin's "Ramayan 3392 A.D" and "Ed Burns' The Dock Walloper," both courtesy of Liquid Comics.

I just got off the phone with Gotham Chopra, the chief creative officer and editor-in-chief of Virgin Comics, and he was choosing his words carefully. "Turbulent? Yes, I guess that's a word for it. Things have been turbulent."

Two weeks ago, Virgin put out a brief press release about a "restructuring" of the company, but corporate-speak couldn't hide the grim reality for the company that made such a splashy debut in 2005: The New York offices were shuttered and the staff of eight there was let go.

What a turnaround. It was just in April that Virgin Comics announced a major new initiative with Stan Lee creating a line of superhero titles, and that was just weeks after the company inked a deal with Hugh Jackman to create a series. At Comic-Con International in July, Chopra and his Virgin team were excited about their Hollywood ventures as well, chief among them "Virulents." (More on that movie, by the way, in a minute.)    

Chopra told me that details will be coming next week about the future of the comic-book company. He said that the downsizing was driven not so much by the publishing business as it was by the macro-economic realities facing its namesake parent, Richard Branson's vast Virgin Enterprises Ltd.  "It's been tough times."