I’ve been considering topics for the first term presentation and been hovering on the idea of how the internet has changed how we consume and interact with media as an art form. The way media is disseminated online has changed dramatically in the last 20 years, and social media has made accessing and sharing content easier than ever.
I’ve been looking at how I could contextualise this within someone’s work – there’s a fantastic British illustrator and animator named Joe Sparrow whose work I’ve admired for a number of years now. He’s relatively new by many standards, his work more or less spanning the last decade.
A particular work of his I’d like to examine in this regard is The Hunter, a 2016 graphic novel, that Joe later published digitally as an animated graphic novel.
I think what’s interessting to note here is that often you’ll find graphic novels adapted to film, with visuals that pay homage to the comics they’re adapting, but The Hunter at its core, is a comic book with animated panels.
Although this isn’t an entirely new phenomenon in itself, prior to digital media there wasn’t really a way that you could achieve anything like this.
There may well be many examples of similar concepts to what is being achieved here in old media, to that end I’ll have to do some more thorough research, but off the top of my head I recall something not too disimilar (that I used to absolutely love) in the Captain Underpants novels by Dav Pilkey. The flip-o-rama segments often near the back of the book were a great gateway for kids (or anyone that was reading I guess) to interact with animation in a way they wouldn’t typically have done in the past.
I’m planning on contacting Joe and asking him some questions on his work in relation to the internet; I think it would be interesting to see how he thinks it feeds into his work.
(I’ll probably add to this over a few days)