Course General Description

At the School of Visual Arts, we can’t be more serious when we talk about comics. In the 1940s we began as a training ground for some of the pioneers of the Golden Age of Cartooning. Now we’re in the midst of the New Platinum Age, one where multicultural influences, ambitious new formats, and an ever-expanding audience has made this challenging medium one of the most exciting and cutting-edge art forms on the planet. Our department covers all the bases in style, including classic adventure comics, experimental graphic novels and Amerimanga, the East-West hybrid. Whether you are preserving the old form or detonating tradition with a new one, you get the same grounding in technique at SVA. Composition and design; perspective; drawing from real life” and color theory. Plot development and the building of dramatic narrative tension are of equal importance, since cartooning is one-half written story. You will learn how to break down the sequential action that shows the story you are telling. Our faculty reflects this aesthetic range, from Klaus Janson (Dark Knight Returns, Daredevil) to Gary Panter (Pee Wee’s Playhouse, Jimbo) to Becky Cloonan (Demo). The curriculum is rigorous. There is a focus on eye/hand training (perspective, page, layout, inking, etc), but there is also a focus on the theoretical, and discussion of how to take this medium into the new millennium. Our approach is quite different from the other college programs teaching comic art. Here, the intellectual and the technical are wed, just as the words and pictures in artworks produced by our award-winning students. An important industry executive recently called the School of Visual Arts “the Harvard of Cartooning,” and we cannot disagree.

School General Description

Welcome to New York City, SVA’s hometown, and the leader of today’s creative economy, with more than 14,000 creative businesses and nonprofits. According to the EY Global Talent in Global Cities 2015 study, New York attracts more creative talent than any other city in the world because it “enjoys a unique cultural scene, embedded in a cosmopolitan and forward-thinking urban environment.” There is no better place to study, practice and work as a creative professional. Critique is a vital and challenging part of the educational experience in a college of art and design. Participating in this practice requires students to be open and vulnerable while they present their work for discussion and questioning, and to trust the transformative powers of the process in service of the work. Through the frequent repetition of this act of openness, students and faculty share and strengthen their humanity, empathy and kinship and their work evolves.