Graphic novel research: changing attitudes to reading and publishing

Graham Rawle’s experimental multimodal literature and design research has revolutionised diverse creative industry sectors internationally, including fiction, comic illustration, graphic novels, music and film, to produce a new way of storytelling. 

He has prompted editors and publishing houses to reconsider their strategies around popular forms of fiction. Challenging the role of readership, materials, form and content, his work has become embedded within higher education creative writing programmes internationally, while consistently challenging readers to rethink how they read, absorb and learn from novels. A long-time tutor at the University of Brighton, Graham Rawle's ingenuity and enthusiasm for narrative experiment have been passed onto hundreds of successful graduates of the internationally respected Masters in Sequential Design/Illustration, a course which he and Margaret Huber developed and expanded after its initial creation by Bruce Brown, John Vernon Lord and George Hardie in 1989.

Graham Rawle has developed innovative techniques in multimodality, involving the interplay between text and image (or text as image) as a way to carry an additional narrative dimension that is neither written nor illustrated, but which emerges through the combined reading of both.  

This has resulted in the production of experimental novels that include Woman’s World (2005), The Card (2012) and Overland (2018). Though the designs and layouts differ from book to book according to the characteristics of the story, each work challenges literary traditions by using visual elements to create sub-textual indicators within the narrative. These engender particularly intense reader experiences through the enhanced visualisation that is possible, in particular for the narrative ‘voice’, the dramatic mood or the geographical space.  

Graphic narrative researcher Graham Rawle's novel, Woman's World, has changed the understanding of how texts are read 

Woman’s World is a 437-page novel collaged entirely from fragments of text clipped from the pages of vintage women’s magazines; these clippings are reassembled to tell the 1962 story of Roy and ‘sister’ Norma’s struggle to live up to the prescribed ideals of feminine perfection. The method of assembly illustrates Norma’s constructed persona and her dependence on the magazines to find her female voice. The metafictional use of real magazines allows characters to be realised and immerses the reader within an original contextual backdrop, magnifying the novel’s questions about sexism, stereotypes, sexuality and social standards as the appropriated material tells its own social, historical and cultural story.

Graham Rawle has won wide critical acclaim through reviews in over 70 international press publications, with Woman’s World being described by Neel Mukherjee in The Times as: ‘a work of genius […] the most wildly original novel produced in this country in the past decade.’ The recontextualizing of existing material in Woman’s World (2005) highlights the main themes of the narrative: gender stereotyping and the prescribed paradigm of femininity as portrayed onscreen in the 1950s and ‘60s.  By playing with perceptions of gender, consumerism and society through its creative methodologies the novel considers constraints of both stereotyping and the novel form. raising important questions about gender construction. 

The Card, one of three novels shortlisted for the 2013 Writers' Guild Best Book Award, required a different visual approach to reflect the protagonist’s thought patterns. Here, the page design makes use of typographic anomalies, and a series of coded graphic symbols that sit in the margins alongside the text. These act as a narrative visual shorthand that highlights the protagonist’s mental condition, apophenia (or ‘patternicity’), which manifests itself in a tendency to perceive, mistakenly, meaningful connections between unrelated things. 

Graham Rawle's experimental graphic novel, Woman's World, brought collaged, 'found text' to the draft narrative, forcing unexpected choices as to phrasing, style and the story. The resulting novel has given readers and critics a new understanding of the process and visuality of text. [top to bottom: Graham Rawle 'writing with scissors', cutting his found text from magazines; a page of collaged text;hardback and softback covers of Woman's World; a panel from the back cover of the novel showing the visual interplay of image and text on the page.]

Graham Rawle's experimental graphic novels tackle research questions as to how books are read and how narratives function 

In Overland, Rawle’s research into visual innovation reflects the overall shape of the narrative, as the central themes of heaven and hell are conveyed through the book’s innovative layout. Designed to be read with its spine aligned horizontally, its parallel alternating narratives unravel simultaneously above and below the book’s spine, orientating the reader spatially within a narrative in which characters and their stories migrate between the bright utopian world of ‘Overland’ and the dark underworld of industry and war. As in Rawle’s previous books, the unexpected format and narrative delivery challenges expectations of how literary fiction should be read, a reader experience that stems from Graham Rawle's experimental research into the potential of the format to tell this specific story.

These works of fiction and practice-led graphic narrative research collectively demonstrate Rawle’s theory that the visuality of the text, when tailored to the aims of specific story, can create a significant added narrative complexity. 

Graham Rawle's novel Overland was in part a research experiment which challenged the conventions of readership. It is designed to be read horizontally, with narratives set overland and underground occupying top and bottom of the page and text being visible through the fine paper.

Graham Rawle has extended his experimental narrative research into the medium of film using collaged, layered clips

Rawle is now bringing these insights and strategies to moving image. The making of the Woman’s World film recycles audiovisual clips to create a narratively fluent film collage. The same methodology is used and clips are sourced, catalogued and archived to allow a version of the original story to be assembled. Unlike other leading contemporary ‘found footage’ filmmakers, Rawle uses a unique process whereby live action film is digitally cut and pasted both sequentially and spatially, so that each single frame might be composed from as many as 15 cut-out and layered film clips. The outcome can thus be viewed as somewhere between a traditional film and a moving collage. No film has ever been created in this way before. This ground-breaking methodology furthers Rawle’s ongoing research into the practice and theory of narrative, continuity, montage and sequence.  

Through the meticulous re-composition of existing film footage his process tests the boundaries of narrative coherence revealing new insights into the perceived importance of established conventions in editing and audience comprehension. It examines the participatory role of the audience, playing on their natural propensity to ‘find’ a narrative thread. Rawle’s film demonstrates that discontinuity in spatial geography, costume, setting etc (once considered prohibitively obstructive to narrative flow) can be made acceptable to an audience so long as the narrative drive is strong, the dramatic intent of the scene remains stable, and a character’s emotional state is changed only by a tangible catalyst.

The success of the experimental novel Woman's World drew Graham Rawle to a complementary experiment in the medium of film, digitally pasting layered film clips to extend the notion of narratives being shaped through found material and encouraging new understanding of the potential of film.

Graphic narrative research by Graham Rawle has had an impact on readers, publishers and creative practices internationally

Rawle’s experimental artistic practices have affected different layers of culture, education, publishing and creative industries across different countries and settings. Creative artists from a wide range of disciplines have cited Rawle’s works and methods as a key influence on their practice, enabling them to test new methods in their own experimental work. Public attention is regularly drawn to Rawle’s novels as they have been widely reviewed in the media. His innovative methods have also had a significant cross-disciplinary impact on the teaching of both design and creative writing. Over 40 educational textbooks draw on this work to teach methods across disparate themes and disciplines. 

The production of these works, and the response received by the public, has led the publishing director at Chatto & Windus to say that these works remain ‘the gold standard for how to bring art into storytelling’ and have brought together the editorial and production functions in the business, which is rare for the publishing industry.  The CEO of US publisher Cursor goes on to say that: ‘Books like Rawle’s do not merely inspire artists and writers; they make it possible for publishers to publish forms that had not been hitherto published. It is a testament to the astonishing creativity of Graham Rawle that he has devised exactly that’.