Variety has an interesting article where they discuss how Portland is slowly becoming the new hub to find comics to be made into movies.  It talks about indie studios are trying new methods at getting their series made into the next X-Men, 300, etc.

Its most recent offering, “300,” based on Frank Miller’s graphic novel, grossed $211 million at the domestic box office and sent copies of the book flying off the shelves.

That’s exactly what publishers are hoping for.

“When these things become movies, it just helps the publishing business, especially publishers of our level,” says Chris Ryall, publisher and editor-in-chief of IDW Publishing. “Everyone in the world knows Superman or Spider-Man. But when ‘300,’ ‘Sin City,’ or a ‘30 Days of Night’ comes out and people aren’t aware of it, it drives people into bookstores to check them out.”

Once again, this mindset worries me.  Too many studios are becoming reliant on getting a series made into a movie to drive the sales of it rather than the series itself.  But at least IDW has the correct mindset:

“By the time you get a movie made, it’s just kind of a nice bonus on top of everything else,” Ryall says. “We never got into this to make movies. We’re certainly a comicbook publisher, and that’s what we do.”

Unfortunately, studios like Platinum don’t:

For several months now, Comic Book Resources gossip columnist Rich Johnston has been reporting a deal by which select retailers would order copies of Platinum Studios’ debut graphic novel, Cowboys & Aliens, and would in exchange be reimbursed for said orders by checks from Platinum, with the assumption that this would, in Johnston’s words, “achieve the No.1 sales of a graphic novel in December, at a time when the media property developer might need the publicity.”