For more than 75 years, SVA has been the training ground for some of the most celebrated artists in cartooning. Today’s multicultural influences, ambitious new formats, and an ever-expanding audience have made comics, apart from being a powerful industry with some of the most devoted fans, a deeply respected language of sequential expression, art discipline, field of study and career.

While studying comics, an artist’s goal is finding a clear path from their passion for storytelling to developing their artistic voice and realizing their ideas. Here, you build a portfolio that reflects your vision, style, capabilities, and talent, effectively introducing you to this fascinating and diverse industry. From graphic novels to autobiographical stories, to experimental, superhero, underground comics – in print or online – your studies help you master plot development, building dramatic narrative tension, sequential action, rendering, and coloring your stories. Legendary faculty, along with some of the hottest property creators, lead you through this process panel after panel.

SVA's instructors, teaching plan, and approach create a unique environment where a student’s intellectual and technical skills are evolved and perfected in tandem. Writing and plot development along with fundamentals in composition, perspective, figure drawing, penciling, inking, panel layout, traditional and digital coloring, lettering, and production, contribute to the competitive skill set responsible for our award-winning students and alumni. 

Rooted in tradition, our serious academic commitment and passion for the medium are represented by the fact that we offer one of the very few Bachelor of Fine Arts in Comics worldwide – a cohesive four-year study under expert instruction and state-of-the-art facilities, in the center of a comics publishing capital.

Every year, a collection of unique BFA Comics senior projects is presented to the industry through our Senior Thesis Show at SVA’s Chelsea Gallery and a pop-up show at our Flatiron Windows Gallery coinciding with the MoCCA Festival in NYC. The department also produces COMX, a compendium of the best work from the current graduating class, and INK, our student-run comics magazine. Along with several comics-specific scholarships our students receive a number of distinctions and career opportunities we actively develop through the mighty SVA network and beyond.