Comic Con India gets a rocking response

After receiving an overwhelming response last year, Comic Con returned to Mumbai once again. Held at the Goregaon Exhibition Centre in Western Mumbai, the two day (21-22 December) Mumbai Film and Comics Convention (MFCC) witnessed a massive response indeed again. With over 5 lakh likes on their official Facebook page, the Comic Con India fever has indeed gone viral. Having visited the Convention, Tellychakkar.com can barely resist sharing the experiences of a day well-spent at Comic Con! With this year's mascot being the Wonderbai, an Indian crossover of the comic character Wonder Woman, once inside you’re welcomed by life size statues of the Marvel Comic superheroes Iron Man and The Hulk welcome you with their trade mark poses. You name it and you would find all the possible comic merchandises at the stalls put up. Apart from Internal DC and Marvel, a host of other Indian comics too made good use of this platform to garner the attention of the crowd, in addition to some very creative retail enterprises like Graphicurry, Manta Ray and Wontolla. One of the outstanding graphic novel publishers was Chariot Comics, which promoted the prequel graphic novel to the first zombie origin film of India, Rise of the Zombie. Promoting Zombie Rising: Volume I, were film actor and co-director, Channel Head, 9XO, Luke Kenny and writer/co-director, Devika Singh. Announcing the film’s sequel, which is “in the works” at MFCC, Kenny said, “The prequel comics, the film, and an upcoming video game aims to serve as a new vision to a western genre and Indianise it.” He further added, “It is the Comic Con Audience that we are aiming at and not necessarily the Bollywood audience. Presenting it to the public when The Walking Dead (a record-smashing US TV series about zombies) is at its peak definitely was an added advantage.” The amicable and humble Devika Singh, writer and co-director of the film, shared, “With a limited audience for this genre majority of the audience has to be educated and then they can acquire the taste for zombie films which borders between blood & gore. The entire genre of zombies is still a rarity in India, a niche on its own; we aim to expose as many Indians as we can; especially now that successful films like Warm Bodies and TV shows like The Returned are taking the world by storm.” The gory and cleverly Indianised Rise of the Zombie is about a wildlife photographer, when infected, to his gradual transformation into a zombie. Luke Kenny’s performance and Devika Singh’s writing in Rise of the Zombie has been positively received across the social media circuit. Also present at the event were Tere Bin Laden writer and director, Abhishek Sharma, who talked about the upcoming “unconventional spinoff” to the 2010 cult comedy hit, creatively titled, Tere Bin Laden 3. Sharma said, “The two films, even though extremely similar exist in two different universes.” Although being coy about adding any further details on the upcoming film, Sharma added for comic relief that, “Since my name [Abhishek Sharma] is such a common name in India that you would find apartment buildings sharing my name; hence I have decided to give all my future characters my last name, Mr. Sharma.” He made this statement as a question asked to the film lead actor also present at MFCC, famous TV host Manish Paul. In response to whether the actor would return to TV since now he is making his debut in films, Paul added, “I will continue hosting, and balance films alongside. I am currently working on a new TV show, but am not at liberty to say more.” All we can say, Comic Con this year was a rocking affair!!!