Abstract

At the School of Visual Art in New York, the MFA in Illustration as Story Telling has encouraged graduates to consider their authorial voice and to extend the boundaries of narrative and sequential visual language. There has been an emergence of autonomous image makers who have identified that their work has an audience outside the parameters of commercially driven briefs and as a consequence have sought to self publish their work. This paper is based on research that reflects on the issues that determine autonomous solutions to the illustrated narrative and looks at individualism in the commercial arena. Consideration of how text and image has been explored by a new generation of visual communicators and its subsequent impact on mainstream publishing will form the main focus of my presentation.