Deepak Chopra was always the one self-help prophet I wouldn’t speed past while channel-surfing, even before he and his son were spearheads of a kickin’ comicbook company. Chopra is the only one of these guys who puts his feel-good capital on the line to ask his followers to consider their role in world peace and not just their stake in personal peace-and-quiet, speaking, for instance, of the poisoning cycle of vengeance and the wellsprings of humanity that can overwhelm medieval hatred and high-tech kill-power right after 9/11, when he himself was automatically at risk of getting plugged by some yahoo who can’t tell a Hindu from a Wahhabist from a chainsaw sculpture.

Anyway, two recently-started Virgin comics (an addiction well-known to sufferers of my regular reviews on ComicCritique.com) helmed by Chopra are must-reading for any kind of fan. BUDDHA is the ambitious adaptation of Chopra’s novel on the legendary holy man, and is one of the best comics being produced today. The eloquent script adaptation by Joshua Dysart encapsulates crystalline truths with zero smugness, and the otherworldly (and, by turns, all-too-worldly) art by Harshvardhan Kadam is a rare achievement of sensory wonder without empty spectacle. This is a journey of enlightenment that will satisfy any fan of fantasy quests and cosmic adventure, with sparkling period detail and mythic texture. And it’s all the more enjoyable (and all the more impressive an accomplishment) for being based in reality — both seen and unseen. BEYOND, conceived by Chopra, written by Ron Marz and drawn by Edison George, is a contemporary thriller with BOURNE-style suspense but a subtext of uneasy global-trade relationships between American industry and an India balanced between ancient spiritual understandings and emerging material opportunities. Chopra’s concept of a topical yet page-turning tale is as strong here as his soul & sorcery balance is in BUDDHA, and Marz’s ear for extraordinary tensions among everyday people is keen, with intricate yet energized art from George. The contrast of stark earthly grit and supernatural discovery keeps the characters guessing while it gets readers thinking about many kinds of worlds to cross between.

One thing both these books are “beyond” is comparison; Virgin is making new genre categories as it fills them, and this was very clear with THE MEGAS, which followed the plots and perils in a parallel America colonized not by pilgrims and pioneers but by Medici-like aristocrats, and still royalist today. The scenario conceived by Jonathan Mostow was a plausible and involving alternate path for the country we became, and an interesting implied comment on the real-life Middle Eastern monarchies with which we share such a paradoxical bond. The book was well-written and not quite like anything else being published; it seems to have wrapped up at Issue 4, somewhat suddenly but with its broad potential intact. I’d like to think that if there’s any culprit it’s art which sometimes made it feel as if the thumbnails had been accidentally switched with the finished pages at presstime, and not some widespread fanboy distaste for geopolitical pulp; in any case THE MEGAS is too good a world to give up on.

One comic I’m glad I stuck with myself is PROJECT: KALKI, whose first issue was the kind of thriller which relies on scientific projections and sets up intricate intrigues but then keeps forgetting its own premises and breaking its own rules. First-issue preliminaries can be bumpy but often the epic that unfolds can be worth those birth pangs, and that’s the case with KALKI’s fascinating second issue, in which modern figures of science and capital (a “clone” of an Indian divinity and the still-living manifestation of a demon) restage an ancient conflict between opposing universal forces which is portrayed with a brilliant insight into the actual overlap and exchange between what the West tends to conceive of as simplistically consistent and distinct “good and evil.” There’s a grand, depressive poetry to Arjun Gaind’s writing, and artist Vivek Shinde is set to join John Paul Leon and Paul Azaceta in the pantheon of meaningful, moody gloom. The book details the probable end of the world, but there’s now one more good reason to hope it doesn’t happen too soon.

Speaking of change, DAN DARE may be the first fully Obama-era comic, with establishment believers fighting to restore competence and common sense from the feckless usurpers they look so much better than. That’s an undercurrent that’s hard to avoid as this sci-fi saga of silent coups and resurgent legends approaches the end of its first arc. People marvel at the restraint and honor of this comic given writer Garth Ennis’ often squalid oeuvre, but, after brilliantly cataloguing how bad we can be and how wrong things can go, he’s tackling the even tougher terrain of envisioning what just rule might look like.

Either way, you don’t need Dan Dare’s rayguns and spaceships to see a lot of the future of comics at Virgin.