What was the trigger point for Mumbai Confidential (MC)?
Saurav Mohapatra: I’ve been fascinated by crime-noir and pulp hardboiled crime fiction. Add to this, my love for the sub-genre of Hindi movies pioneered by Satya, Company and Ab Tak Chhappan; I wanted to infuse it into a single narrative to create the genesis of MC. Earlier, I had written a story called Mumbai Macguffin for Virgin Comics with Saumin Patel, and I had a blast while doing it. Mumbai is a great prism. After Macguffin, I wanted to set a more serious noir story in Mumbai, and began work on MC. It wouldn’t have existed, but for the support of our publisher Archaia. They believed in us and allowed us to craft our book, while providing support in reaching it out to readers in every corner ofu00a0the globe.
Vivek Shinde: Being Mumbai-based, this city is daily life for me. When Saurav contacted me for Mumbai Confidential, I was happy to tie up (having learnt of his earlier works). I was hooked on to the script, instantly because it was set in Mumbai. I always wanted to work on something like this.u00a0

Nana Patekar was a huge influence on both creators

You’ve mentioned that it was pitched as James Elroy does Ab Tak Chhappan... tell our readers about this slant to the titles. We also notice a Nana Patekar-like figure…
SM: Noir is a universal genre. It is underpinnings like the morally ambiguous protagonist, a world where everyone ranges from bad to worse, the cynical world view — all of this, appeals to a dark and deep inside of our souls. With MC, our goal was to take these iconic tropes, filter them through the unique milieu of the underbelly of Mumbai and tell an entertaining story. MC owes as much to Chandler and Hammet, as it does to Anurag Kashyap and Ram Gopal Verma. u00a0Nana Patekar is a colossus of the Hindi movie industry. This character is a homage to him, not an exact likeness, but a reflection of all the iconic roles he has played in this genre. As the story progresses, you will see many such nudge-nudge-wink-wink references to iconic scenes from seminal Indian movies. In issue #2 (chapter 4), the dream sequence is homage to Zanjeer, and one of the interlude shorts in issue #3 was inspired by Parveen Babi’s entry scene in Deewar.u00a0MC owes a lot to Bollywood- Mumbai Noir, traditional Hollywood crime-noir, hardboiled, crime fiction of Elroy, Chandler, Hammet and MacDonald, and the Hong Kong-Japanese crime movies. It also owes a lot to crime comics like Torpedo, 100 Bullets, Criminal and Sin City.
VS: I was trying to create this bad cop character with a sharp personality. The typical Maharashtrian police cop-moustache was a must; while drawing him, Nana Patekar’s image kept cropping up because his role as an angry cop is influential. He was a huge inspiration.