Christmas came early this year. As promised, we are posting a preview of Chapter 1 of Mumbai Confidential Book 1 “Good Cop, Bad Cop“.

So we’ll be back in Jan with new exploration and never before seen concept art and some other goodies. The MC Team has always valued our fans and community and this is our christmas gift to you.

If you want to link to it :

http://www.mumbaiconfidential.com/preview/previewchapter-1/.

Also we’re on TWITTER and FACEBOOK too, so drop us a ping if you feel like it.

Enjoy and Happy Holidays!

So after getting quite a few quotes north of $500, I decided to just bite the bullet and create a WordPress theme for Mumbai Confidential website myself. It was not much of a pain. The current theme you see is created from scratch and was coded using the excellent Komodo Edit in a box running Ubuntu Karmic Koala. I made the site layout I wished in GIMP and then chopped it up into an HTML page.

I found a really nice resource for coding WP Themes by hand at themeshaper.com. So after a night’s slog, I had a working theme. It’s my first wordpress theme and would love if you dropped me a note if you encounter a glitch in the matrix while browsing the pages.

All in all it was fun unleashing the geekery once again , now back to xmas holidays and waiting for the christmas blizzard of ‘09 to hit Shrewsbury. We’ll be back in Jan with new art, a full preview of chapter 1 and many more goodies.

See you on the other side.

So Vivek turned in the final images and after dressing it this is what we ended up with. (click for hires)

So vivek has fired in some more pages and we are working on a cover concept. I’m going to post two of the cover tries. these are mockups we made to play around with various layouts/compositions and these contain some placeholder content.

Click on the images for higher resolution versions.

as usual do feel free to let us know what you like or don’t like about the two layouts.

This is just a brief post to mention the other web / community pages for Mumbai Confidential.

Website: http://www.mumbaiconfidential.com (well, duh! )

Twitter : http://twitter.com/mumbaiconfid

Facebook : http://www.facebook.com/pages/Mumbai-Confidential/128123608452

So join us on Twitter and Facebook and spread the word. MC is creator owned and we’re banking on fans such as you to get the word out.

Here is a three page preview (Strong language and swearing, so not suitable for minors) (click for higer res pages)

In case you were wondering where the updates went, it’s just that we had to keep quiet for the right reasons. Mumbai Confidential has almost found a publisher and the good news is it’ll be released in India first

So keep your fingers crossed and RSS Readers peeled, for I’m going to make the announcement soon…ish!

Here are some initial character explorations for MC as sent in by Vivek

Unfortunately Sid Kotian has left the art team due to some personal engagements, but fikar nawt folks, artist Vivek Shinde (PROJECT: KALKI, SNAKEWOMAN, SPECIAL OFFICER SAWANT) has stepped in as my collaborator on Mumbai Confidential.

Vivek has already turned in some explorations which I’ll be posting soon-ish and I must say his take on the characters is really really kick-ass.

Wow, I never though I’d get this kind of response when I put up this site. Mumbai Confidential is a creator owned project, so every bit of support helps. Currently we (Sid and I) are thinking about pitching it for publication both in India and the US. But we want definitely to keep our ownership of the project. So most probably we’ll try out Image Comics and other publishers open to that.

Also the India publication is a must. This books audience resides in India and as far as I’m concerned it shall be available in India from day one.

The plan for now is to create two versions of the book (same art) — an Indian Edition where the dialogue is a mix of Hindi and English (I tried that out in Mumbai Macguffin ( Virgin Comics 2008) and it came out well, I think) and an International Edition with English only dialogue.