This Indian Cartoonist’s Big Moment Has Arrived

Scroll wrote about Charbak Dipta, an Indian cartoonist whose self-published comic was nominated for Eisner and Harvey awards: West Bengal-based Charbak Dipta was nominated for the Best Digital Comic category in the 2026 Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards for The World of Lublu (published in Bengali by Book Farm as Lublur Prithibi). Named for the pioneering comics creator and graphic novelist Will Eisner, the Eisner Awards are considered the “Oscars” of the comic book industry. The winners were announced on July 24 at the San Diego Comic Con International. “Charbak Dipta is not the first Indian to be nominated,” scholar and cover designer Pinaki De remarked about the Eisner Award nomination, “but the fact that his work is done entirely in India, originally published in Bengali for a regional market, makes it so special. To think that anyone here can also make it without extensive ‘foreign’ connections augurs well for the future of Indian comics. In that sense, he is a trailblazer.” The World of Lublu has also been nominated for this year’s Harvey Awards for Digital Book of the Year. This prize is named after pioneering American cartoonist Harvey Kurtzman, and no book-length, creator-...