Virgin Books, founded by Richard Branson, has announced a partnership with author Deepak Chopra, acclaimed director Shekhar Kapur and South Asia's leading publishing house Gotham Entertainment for creating original comic books and animation characters for a global audience.
The partnership would form two companies Virgin Comics and Animation Private Ltd based in Bangalore and Virgin Comics LLC in New York for carrying out their projects.
The new partnership is confident that in the next decade, Asia will become one of the largest producers, as well as consumers, of entertainment products.
India is a growing and thus important market for consumers of such products and also a source of unique, innovative content to be brought to the world in comics and licensed to movies, animations and toys, they said.
This partnership, brings Virgin into an area of comics and animation for the first time, Branson said adding, "India is an incredibly vibrant market which Virgin already, through Virgin Atlantic, has the pleasure of working in."
Commenting on the new partnership, Deepak Chopra said it would bring together east and west and at the forefront would be new minds, new talents and new voices that would "reinvent the stories that unite us and that we live by."
"I see the future. It is the brave new world of entertainment. The art of the two-hour captive, non-interactive product called the movie is history. Comic book characters -- traditional and digital -- are the new cult. India's 600 million teenagers are now at the forefront of the creation of these new gods," Kapur said.