Sneak Peeks and Status Update

Waiting for the last two pages of art from Vivek. The Archaia team has done an amazing job on the cover and overall book design. Can hardly wait to share that 🙂

Anyways, here’s a bunch of random sneak peeks we posted on our facebook page. If you want to stay up-to-date on all things Mumbai Confidential, do “like” our facebook page at http://facebook.com/mumbaiconfidential or follow us on twitter at http://twitter.com/mumbaiconfid

Mumbai Confidential issue #5 is now online as of first week nov at http://bit.ly/mcfull (available for your iOS, Android, and Web broswer reading pleasure). The print hardcover from Archaia will hit the stands in March 2013.


Blurbs for Mumbai Confidential




Old Cover Mockups/Roughs/Layout Tests


Here are some roughs that we put together to visualize how the issue covers will look like. the art is very rough and these are used to get the final look of the cover nailed.



Preview pages from Mumbai Confidential #5



Some more preview art and other updates

Before we start off… the mandatory spiel 🙂

Mumbai Confidential “digital first” edition is now available from ComiXology for purchase on iPhone/iPad, Android, Kindle Fire and the web. Print hardcover from Archaia will hit the bookshelves in MARCH 2013.

The launch at SDCC was awesome. Thanks to our wonderful publishers Archaia, I had a great time. We’re down to the home stretch now and Vivek is winding up the last 40 odd pages art on the book. Here are some awesome sneak peaks at his art from upcoming issues.

Vivek’s art really breathes life into the world of Mumbai Confidential.

aha, before I forget…

here’s Samit Basu on Mumbai Confidential :

Watch out for this book. If you turn your back on it, it might stab you.

Thanks, Samit. We love you too. 🙂

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…]

Close Encounters

So, the Archaia page for Mumbai Confidential is up. So are creator pages for both Vivek and yours truly. As you can see on the page for MC at Archaia site, digital run starts July 2011 and the final print collection is scheduled for March 2013. So load up on the Chai Cutting and Vada Paav, the Mumbai invasion has begun 🙂

Do check out the MC Facebook page and Twitter feed. We’d love to hear back from you.

And, since we’ve made it this far, here’s a brief (in no particular order and by no means a complete) list of people (apart from the editorial team at our awesome publisher Archaia) we’d like to say thanks to (without whose support MC would’ve never happened):

  • Preeti Padhy
  • Aditi Kelkar-Shinde
  • Sid Kotian
  • Saumin Patel
  • Vinay Brahmania
  • Ron Marz
  • Mark Smylie
  • Samit Basu
  • Pradipta Sarkar
  • Mukesh Singh
  • Devaki Neogi-Kiran
  • Shounak Jog

About Mumbai Confidential

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

Mumbai Confidential coming soon to a digital device and a bookshop near you :)

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…]

“Sketch and the City” – Mumbai Times hails the grim and gritty Mumbai of MC

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…]

In living color (sort of)

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…]

New Pinup by Sudhanshu Pandey

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…]

What’s the best thing about working on MC? The awesome Vivek Shinde art drops, of course! :)

We make no secret of the fact that Mumbai Confidential is a love song to the pulp crime / hard-boiled movies and books we love (both Indian and Foreign). So from time to time, when Vivek and I discuss the visual tone/feel of MC, the amazing Mr. Shinde dashes off some quick explorations. These may or may not have direct implications on the main story art, but they are damn cool to look at.

We’ve used old hindi movie posters like this one, pulp crime book covers etc. for inspiration to strike the correct balance between the classic pulpy hardboiled-ness and Vivek’s unique painted style in MC art.

Since Vivek has been overloading my awesome-ness sensors for a while now, I felt that the time has come to share with you some of those images. 🙂

About Mumbai Confidential

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

The image is for preview purposes only. Mumbai Confidential is copyright and trademark of Saurav Mohapatra and Vivek Shinde. All rights reserved. This site’s content are copyright of Mohapatra and Shinde. All rights are reserved.

Digital Short #2 “MISSED CALL” – Work in Progress

Artist Shounak Jog (India Authentic, Vargav) has picked up the script for Digital Short #2 MISSED CALL and sent in some WIP thumbs when I was away at SDCC.

Shounak has a great flowing style that I admire a lot (He did awesome work for India Authentic : GARUDA issue) and I, for one, am waiting eagerly to see what he does with the script. If the rough WIP thumbs below are any indication, we’re in for a visual treat. 🙂





Enjoy these while we wait for Shounak to finish the short, after which 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…]