The rise of cosplay culture

The fest where the so-called geeks and nerds drool has surely etched its name in the history of pop culture. And with the rise of Comic Con around the globe, the popularity of costume play also known as ‘Cosplay’ has gained traction among youth. Recently, Comic Con India has announced the winner of the Maruti Suzuki Arena Indian Championship of Cosplay 2019. A unique and premier competition that has been bringing together the best of costume designs and talents from across the country since its inception, the results of Indian Championship of Cosplay (ICC) 2019 have been officially declared on its website and all its official social media platforms.
 
Akshay Churi (Cosplaying as Jim Raynor) has been declared as the winner of the main championship and will be competing with cosplay champions hailing from countries like USA, Australia, China, France, Austria, Singapore, and Indonesia to win the coveted ‘Quest for the Crown’ 2019. 
CGI artist Akshay Churi informs that he started cosplaying four years ago and his first cosplay was Batman from the ‘Dark Knight’ trilogy. “I cosplayed this year as Jim Raynor from ‘Starcraft’. The armour is called marine armour and stands 8 feet tall. It is more comfortable than it looks. This was a challenging build and I focused mainly on maximising mobility, visibility and detailing.”

“It took me 30 days to get the costume ready. Everything about the costume has been built from scratch. The costume is hand painted using acrylic and oil paints. Led Strips and acrylic are used for the lighting effects. It cost me somewhere around Rs 18,000 - 20,000. 
“My next cosplay event will be representing India at the Crown Championship at C2E2 Chicago. The costume I’m preparing for this event is called 'Zinogre God’ from the video game 'Monster Hunter',” Akshay shares. 

The contest had eight finalists, each of whom won the respective cosplay competitions held on each day during the Maruti Suzuki Arena Comic Con 2018 in Hyderabad, Bengaluru, Delhi and Mumbai. The finalists for ICC 2019 were Jeet Molankar, Vipin Aryan, and Shine Saha representing Delhi, Akshay Churi and Akshay Jadhav from Mumbai, Anupam Chandra and Shabaz Ahmed from Bengaluru, and Sridhar Thaduri from Hyderabad.

Hyderabad’s very own Sridhar Thaduri, who is an IT guy by day and artist/cosplayer over weekends cosplayed as Monkey King from the game ‘Dota 2’. He says, “My love for the arts, crafts and pop culture brought me to cosplaying.”

About his costume, he says, “This costume was built completely by hand. I used foam, fabric, latex, PVC pipes and artificial fur. I worked mostly on the weekends. The difficult part to build was the dragon heads, for that, I built a miniature clay model of a dragon to make patterns. I used pop face cast of mine to build the latex mask which was a tricky but fun thing to do. It had a lot of details, especially the dragon scales and facial hair on the mask. It took me one and a half month to build the costume.”

“I spent close to Rs 7,500 to build this costume. I knew it will cost a lot, so I planned my purchases over a couple of months and avoided the burden in one month. I built it all myself from the scratch,” he adds.