The Four Color Media Monitor

Animation Xpress reports on what's said to be the first official school for comics art in India:

Veteran comic artist and educator Dilip Chaubey has launched India’s first comic book school for comic art education. Called The Dilip Chaubey School of Art (DCSA), the institute offers six-month certification program in Character Design, Comic Illustration and Digital Art in its Lucknow campus.

Chaubey has over 30 years of experience in illustration and teaching. He has served as a senior professor in Digital Arts at an American University. He was a former illustrator at Raj Comics, where he created characters like Tiranga, Parmanu, and Fighter Toads in the 90s. With over 300 comics under his belt at Raj Comics, and 14 years teaching internationally, his expertise is widely recognised.

Chaubey’s DCSA is dedicated to training artists in sequential arts and upskilling the crafts of the comics industry. As per the institute, its focus is on a practical skill-based learning approach, providing hands-on, industry-aligned training to shape students into top-skilled artists. DCSA claims to offer an international-level curriculum, bridging the gap between Indian and global comic art standards.

“Comic artwork in India is relatively poor compared to the Marvels/DCs of the world and this has been the key factor as to why our Indian comics industry has never taken off,” said Chaubey, who is the founder & dean of DCSA. “The main reason why the quality of comic art has been relatively poor is the lack of formal comic art education, skill-based learning techniques, and proper resources that enable students to become top artists and make a successful career in art.”

If he thinks local art isn't as good as Marvel/DC art, he should get a good look at the ghastly output from the Big Two in the past decade. The stories are poor, but so is the art, and if DC hadn't imitated Marvel initially, they soon got around to following suit in terms of poor art quality, recalling how horrifically awful the art in Robin became of recent, when they got around to victimizing Robin with LGBT ideology full force. The way the Big Two are going now makes even the most mediocre comics from Asia look like masterpieces by comparison.

I wish the guy good luck going forward with this new art school, and hopefully in the future, new generations will be able to produce art and story that'll benefit the medium in ways mainstream superhero fare in the USA no longer is.

Labels: Europe and Asia, history, technology