Salil Bhargava, Former CEO of Zeebo Interactive Studios has joined Graphic India as COO. Graphic India is a comic book and animation company backed by Peter Chernin's CA Media and Liquid Comics, with Sharad Devarajan as its CEO. Speaking with MediaNama, Bhargava said that his mandate will be primarily to set up the digital business. The plan is for Graphic India to the business across all mediums, and there will be a gaming component as well. They're setting up the team now. Bhargava was also previously the CEO of Reliance ADA Group backed mobile game development firm Jump Games. Note that Liquid Comics owes its origins to a largely unsuccessful venture in Virgin Comics - their mandate was also to create intellectual property and monetize it across platforms, and was backed by media industry bigwigs like Deepak Chopra, Richard Branson and Shekhar Kapur, and the Virgin Group eventually exited in 2008 with the management team - Sharad Deverajan, Gotham Chopra (Deepak Chopra’s son) and Suresh Seetharaman - taking the stake. We asked Bhargava about what is different this time around. "I think the time is right, as compared to earlier. In this case, what we've got a market that is very different from 2004-05, and that's where I'm coming from. Both in India, and the world, YouTube has grown, there's traction on mobile video." Graphic India had raised money from CA Media in January this year, with plans to release new digital content based on comic books previously published by Liquid Comics, including: Devi,…
