Caged Comics

As a big comics fan, I was amused to read this interesting piece in the London Times about how Hollywood actor Nicholas Cage and Richard Branson, one of Britain’s top businessmen, are teaming up to give Marvel and DC a run for their money:

ZAP! Sir Richard Branson decides to take on America’s superhero comic publishing giants. Bam! He needs a Hollywood sidekick to boost the profile of his newly formed Virgin Comics. Kapow! Enter Nicolas Cage, the Oscar-winning actor, who happens to have a 16-year-old son with a talent for drawing cartoons.

An improbable alliance between the British entrepreneur and the comic-obsessed Cage family will come to fruition this week with the publication on Wednesday of a new series of voodoo-themed comics set in New Orleans after the destruction of Hurricane Katrina.

The series is based on characters and stories dreamt up by Cage’s son Weston. It was developed by Virgin Comics, an India-based publishing venture linking Branson and several of the biggest names in Indian entertainment, among them Deepak Chopra, the bestselling author, and Shekhar Kapur, the film and theatre director.

The Cages are jointly credited as “creative producers” of the Voodoo Child series, which tells the story of a curse imposed at the outset of the American civil war returning to haunt the streets of modern-day New Orleans. A detective investigating a series of murders begins to real-ise they were connected with a violent rebellion on a Southern plantation more than 100 years earlier.

Cage is a huge collector of comics and has stared in many comic-book-type roles, most recently as Marvels’ mysterious Ghost Rider:

Cage recalled that he had first come across the Ghost Rider comics as a seven-year-old: “I saw this comic with this colourful flaming skull on the cover and he’s coming right at you - I was transfixed. It is really how I got into reading and I still have that actual comic.”

Over the years Cage accumulated one of America’s most valuable collections of early comics, among them an original copy of the first Superman comic, published in 1938. Several years ago he sold part of the collection at auction for more than $1.6m (£800,000).

Cage’s comic enthusiasm has proved a boon to Branson’s efforts to challenge Marvel and DC, the two companies that dominate the $2.5 billion US comic business. Virgin’s deal with the Gotham Entertainment Group, a leading south Asian comic publisher run by Chopra’s son Gotham, is aimed at combining western enthusiasm for stories of superheroes with the more spiritual themes that have become popular in the rapidly growing Asian comic market.