Without much further ado, here are some sneak peek panels from the book featuring Vivek’s delicious art after the jump.

Oh BTW, if you haven’t please do add us on Facebook and Twitter.

Sneak Peek #1

Sneak Peek #2

About Mumbai Confidential

Mumbai Confidential is a crime noir comic book series created by Saurav Mohapatra and Vivek Shinde [more...]

So, thank you loyal fans. We know it’s been significantly longer than a Mumbai minute since we announced Mumbai Confidential as a creator-owned project. We got great news for you.

As you might’ve noticed (if you follow our facebook or twitter feed) at C2E2 this year our publisher Archaia announced the impending release of MC (digital first and then print hardcover). Also, the hunt is on for an Indian publisher to do an Indian edition.

Vivek and I have been busy: he’s been cranking out awesomely lovely pages like a mad man and with a little bit help from my array of scripts and programs, I’ve been busy coloring and lettering them. We’re so on, baby!

I know the updates on this site haven’t been that frequent lately. That’s because we’ve been awfully busy in getting the book past the finish line. So fikaar nawt, it’s coming and it’s looking better than ever. Keep watching the skies…

We leave you with sneak peeks at two of the finished color panels from the book to tide you over till the next update

Sneak Peek Panel 1

Sneak Peek Panel 2

About Mumbai Confidential

Mumbai Confidential is a crime noir comic book series created by Saurav Mohapatra and Vivek Shinde [more...]

Mumbai Times, the sunday city edition of Times of India has an article titled “Sketch and the City” detailing the increasing trend of using realistic portrayals of cities as a major theme in recent Indian Comics books. They use Mumbai Confidential as the lead and spend bulk of the article exploring the gritty portrayal of the Indian metropolis in the preview pages.

Also, namechecked is Mumbai Macguffin, the action-adventure comedy by me and Saumin Patel now serialized by Graphic India

The article goes on to explore other recent Indian comic books that are set in real cities and use the themes and settings of modern day India to the fullest.

The line that brought a chuckle when I read it first was : “Unlike an earlier generation that had to make do with mythological storylines set in fictional locations…”

Money quote from the article:

This ‘encounter’ sequence isn’t a strand of Anurag Kashyap‘s dark imagination. It belongs to the soon-to-be-released Indian graphic novel Mumbai Confidential. In the book, no stone has been left unturned to capture the Mumbai underworld in all its gritty authenticity- writer Saurav Mohapatra’s characters speak the real stuff.

Scan courtsey: Preeti George

About Mumbai Confidential

Mumbai Confidential is a crime noir comic book series created by Saurav Mohapatra and Vivek Shinde [more...]

The other day I was reading some paper on “colorization by optimization” which is a technique for programmatically/algorithmically coloring grayscale images via some human hints. The geek in me couldn’t resist trying out how Mumbai Confidential would look like (since Vivek’s awesome grayscale style is uniquely suited to this approach). So I hunted for some sample code, found some and tweaked it and ran it with a sample page.

Algorithmic generation:
So I took a grayscale page from MC, with a mouse gave some color hints and ran it through the program. The algorithm works by a weighted mean of Luminance (Y) of the neighboring pixels and uses a technique of creating blended pixel sets (based on pointers taken from here) the source image and using the hint image generates the Color (Cb) and Chrominance (Cr) values. Basically “spreads” the hint colors and “smears” them across pixels.

As you can see the process is cool enough, but doesn’t yield good results. I chalk it up to my inability to demarcate areas in the base image (with a mouse).

So I tried a bit more and finally came up with something that resembled a flatted out image.

A few mins of TLC with GIMP filters with layers and I had some passable color images of the page.

After applying softglow (and fixing the sky):

Now, I am no talented artist like Vivek and this was just for the heck of it to explore a mathematical approximation of something that the artist does intuitively. Maths (especially Applied Maths) has been an interest of mine and programming is my dayjob. Add to that, how passionate I’m about comics and this sort of thing is what makes life enjoyable.

As an aside, all of this isn’t my work. The grayscale image was drawn by Vivek and the algorithm and implementation hints came from people who have done work in this field. I just put them together and played with it a bit.

Found a GIMP plugin that implements the colorization at http://zenthought.org/content/project/colorize. makes the pipeline much faster. Plugin code has a bug which manifests if first image is closed, will try to get it fixed and maybe take over the development of that plugin.

Here is another sample page after a quick pass through GIMP plug-in:

– Saurav

About Mumbai Confidential

Mumbai Confidential is a crime noir comic book series created by Saurav Mohapatra and Vivek Shinde [more...]

So, Times of India has posted a list of notable Indian comics or as the byline puts it “Indians who bring a different side of the country to light via their comic book characters”.
[click the image for a hires view]

link to the ePaper for Dec 3rd, Mumbai Edition

As an aside, DEVI, a book I worked on at Virgin comics from issue #10-20 also made the list.

About Mumbai Confidential Digital Shorts

MUMBAI CONFIDENTIAL Digital Shorts are a series of companion comics to the first book “GOOD COP, BAD COP” by various artists using the characters created by Saurav Mohapatra and Vivek Shinde. These shorts are set in the same “universe” as the main story. Though these are not required to follow the main book, they do enhance the backstory of GOOD COP, BAD COP.

About Mumbai Confidential

Mumbai Confidential is a crime noir comic book series created by Saurav Mohapatra and Vivek Shinde [more...]

So, the finished pages for MISSED CALL, the digital short that Shounak Jpg’s been working on have started trickling in and I must say they do look delicious.

Will post updates here, as more pages flow in. Meanwhile Saumin Patel has turned in his layouts for “HOUSE OF CARDS” – the third digital short and I shall be sharing them soon enough on these pages.

About Mumbai Confidential Digital Shorts

MUMBAI CONFIDENTIAL Digital Shorts are a series of companion comics to the first book “GOOD COP, BAD COP” by various artists using the characters created by Saurav Mohapatra and Vivek Shinde. These shorts are set in the same “universe” as the main story. Though these are not required to follow the main book, they do enhance the backstory of GOOD COP, BAD COP.

About Mumbai Confidential

Mumbai Confidential is a crime noir comic book series created by Saurav Mohapatra and Vivek Shinde [more...]

So we’re not dead . I made the move from east coast of USA to the west coast and was down and out for a good part of last quarter => hence, the paucity of updates on this site. We’re back to a schedule and will post Vivek Shinde’s delicious art as soon as I get my hand on it.

In other news, Saumin Patel (my frequent collaborator from the Virgin Comics days on DEVI and co-creator of MUMBAI MACGUFFIN) honored a long standing request and sent in some pieces about his interpretation of MC. Saumin has a style that is truly unique and I feel his renditions of a hard boiled genre piece like MC, makes me wanna bug him some more for a full fledged digital short.

–Saurav

MUMBAI CONFIDENTIAL Digital Shorts are a series of companion comics to the first book “GOOD COP, BAD COP” by various artists using the characters created by Saurav Mohapatra and Vivek Shinde. These shorts are set in the same “universe” as the main story. Though these are not required to follow the main book, they do enhance the backstory of GOOD COP, BAD COP.

About Mumbai Confidential

Mumbai Confidential is a crime noir comic book series created by Saurav Mohapatra and Vivek Shinde [more...]

Artist Sudhanshu Pandey felt inspired by Mumbai Confidential as a concept and contributed this pinup

We were so impressed, we asked him to draw a new Digital Short called House of Cards. More updates on that soon.

About Mumbai Confidential Digital Shorts

MUMBAI CONFIDENTIAL Digital Shorts are a series of companion comics to the first book “GOOD COP, BAD COP” by various artists using the characters created by Saurav Mohapatra and Vivek Shinde. These shorts are set in the same “universe” as the main story. Though these are not required to follow the main book, they do enhance the backstory of GOOD COP, BAD COP.

About Mumbai Confidential

Mumbai Confidential is a crime noir comic book series created by Saurav Mohapatra and Vivek Shinde [more...]

Mumbai Confidential has certainly been in the news recently. Firstly, Anisha Sridhar covered both MC and Dhurandhar for New Indian Express.

Gangsters and Ghosts in new format by Anisha Sridhar in New Indian Express

On Nov 21, Sneha Mahale covered Mumbai Confidential for Hindustan Times.

City cops in graphic novel by Sneha Mahale in Hindustan Times

About Mumbai Confidential

Mumbai Confidential is a crime noir comic book series (about the infamous encounter cops of Mumbai) created by Saurav Mohapatra and Vivek Shinde [more...]

As discussed earlier Artist Shounak Jog (India Authentic, Vargav) has picked up the script for Digital Short #2 MISSED CALL.

He turned in some marvelous thumbs for the story, which I’m sharing here. Remember these are rough layouts/thumbs and aren’t cleaned up.

Once Shounak finishes the short it shall be posted here. Meanwhile you can enjoy Sid Kotian’s work on Digital Short #1 REMASTER.

About Mumbai Confidential Digital Shorts

MUMBAI CONFIDENTIAL Digital Shorts are a series of companion comics to the first book “GOOD COP, BAD COP” by various artists using the characters created by Saurav Mohapatra and Vivek Shinde. These shorts are set in the same “universe” as the main story. Though these are not required to follow the main book, they do enhance the backstory of GOOD COP, BAD COP.

About Mumbai Confidential

Mumbai Confidential is a crime noir comic book series created by Saurav Mohapatra and Vivek Shinde [more...]