Graham Rawle: experimental multimodal literature and design research

To the world, Graham Rawle, is remembered for his intelligent humour and tireless creative endeavour. With novels like Woman's World (2005) that took years of 16-hour working days, or the stream of 'Lost Consonants' published in the Guardian, he combined an intoxicating humour with remarkable industry and dedication. For the University of Brighton, Graham Rawle was this and more. A dedicated teacher and inspirational colleague, of course, but he was also a leading and impactful researcher in the field of literature, illustration and sequential design practice. 

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

His work 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 became embedded within higher education creative writing programmes internationally, while consistently challenging readers to rethink how they read, absorbed and learned from novels.

A friend to many at the University of Brighton, Graham Rawle's ingenuity and enthusiasm for narrative experiment was passed onto hundreds of successful graduates of the internationally respected Masters in Sequential Design/Illustration, a course which he and his wife Margaret Huber developed and expanded after its initial creation by Bruce Brown, John Vernon Lord and George Hardie in 1989.

Clear to all his fans world-wide, Graham Rawle developed innovative techniques to exploit the interplay between text and image (or text as image). He exploited this multi-modality as a way to carry an additional narrative dimension that is neither written nor illustrated, but which emerges through the combined experience of both. To engage with Graham Rawle's work is to explore new routes into humour and the communication of it. 

His alternative approach to the novel, graphically designed books running from from Diary of an Amateur Photographer (1998) to Overland (2018), challenged literary traditions by using visual elements to create sub-textual indicators within the narrative. These had the effect of engendering wonderfully intense reader experiences through the enhanced visualisation that is possible, in particular for the narrative ‘voice’, the dramatic mood or the geographical space.

"You need this!" EXPO 2000 - Hi-Life (Basic Needs)

In 1999, Graham Rawle was invited by Indian scenographer Rajeev Sethi to create an installation for the Basic Needs themed pavilion at EXPO 2000, the World's Fair held in Hannover, where over 190 nations assembled to embark on the twenty-first century together.

The fair opened to the public on June 1, 2000 and ran for five months, attended by over 23,000 journalists and more than 25 million visitors.

Reinforcing Germany's commitment to sustainable development, this 4,000 square foot post-apocalyptic Hi-Life supermarket was designed to illustrate the consequences of excessive consumerism. Surreal scenes offered a provocative image of the affluent society of the west, highlighting our thoughtlessness as consumers.

His team spent 12 months preparing the exhibit in a London studio before shipping it to Germany for the 5-week installation. It explored the use of advertising, product design and packaging, promoting hundreds of hand-made products with the Hi-Life slogan, “You Need This!”

The supermarket also incorporated specially created audio soundtracks and video loops as well as electro-mechanical pieces coordinated by timers and motion sensors. Headed by Graham Rawle, the project employed the specialist skills of a number of artists and designers including Lucy Vigrass, Miles Donovan, Chrissie Macdonald, Andrew Rae, Graham Carter, Stephen Lenthall, Jenny Bowers, Brendan Walker, Jo Longhurst, Luke Best and Chris Joscelyne and Margaret Huber. Many of these artists were graduates from the University of Brighton’s internationally-reputed BA(Hons) Illustration course. Having enjoyed working collaboratively, they later formed the illustration collective Peepshow.

Graham Rawle and his students created a 4,000 square-foot, post-apocalyptic 'Hi-Life supermarket', for the Basic Needs pavillion at EXPO 2000 in Hannover, designed to illustrate the consequences of excessive consumerism.

Who created the 'Lost Consonants' series in The Guardian? 

The Lost Consonants were the creation of Graham Rawle, who sent an initial six to The Guardian newspaper and carried on producing them for fifteen years. He was originally planning to call the series 'Missing Consonants' but Bill Bryson's Lost Continents book was very big in 1990 and it seemed a funnier title as a word-play on that. 

The Lost Consonants series showed Graham Rawle's seemingly endless creativity and good humour. His own favourite, he told us at his University of Brighton workshops, was number 96: "Whenever the doorbell rang, the dog started baking". He told an interviewer at b3ta that he sometimes had trouble making lines work or getting the right pictures. "I get a lot of suggestions from readers through my website and mostly they're pretty good, but I've usually done them before," he said. In a meeting at what was then the Faculty of Arts at the University of Brighton, Graham was asked if he might consider illustrating the 'Faulty of Arts' -- "ah, now that's one I haven't done yet," he said, archly.  

In another conversation at the University of Brighton Graham Rawle explained and signed a print of another favourite of Lost Consonant fans. It was not published in The Guardian, he told us, as the editor didn't see which letter was missing, but Graham added it to his published collections and it was circulated by postcards. In it, the familiar collage style shows the popular composer Andrew Lloyd Webber. The text beneath reads: "Andrew Lloyd Webber writes another hit musical."

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 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 recontextualising 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 on screen 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 tackled research questions as to how books are read and how narratives function 

In Overland, Rawle’s research into visual innovation reflected 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.

Woman's World ... the movie

Graham Rawle was inspired to bring his collage-seeking brain to a new medium and began a project to bring these insights and strategies to moving image. The making of the Woman’s World film would ambitiously recycle audiovisual clips to create a narratively fluent film collage. The same methodology would be used as with the novel -- clips were sourced, catalogued and archived to allow a version of the original story to be assembled. Unlike the majority of ‘found footage’ film-makers, Graham Rawle used 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.

At the time of his death, with ten minutes of the film completed and the hope that his co-producers would continue the work, Graham Rawle's ground-breaking methodology aimed to continue into the practice and theory of narrative, continuity, montage and sequence. Through the meticulous re-composition of existing film footage, his processes were testing the boundaries of narrative coherence, revealing new insights into the perceived importance of established conventions in editing and audience comprehension. The Woman's World experiments also examined the participatory role of the audience, playing on their natural propensity to ‘find’ a narrative thread. This would demonstrate that discontinuity in spatial geography, costume, setting etc (once considered prohibitively obstructive to narrative flow) could be made acceptable to an audience so long as the narrative drive was strong, the dramatic intent of the scene remains stable, and a character’s emotional state was 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

Graham 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 Graham Rawle’s novels as they have been widely reviewed in the media. His innovative methods continue to have a significant cross-disciplinary impact on the teaching of both design and creative writing while over 40 educational textbooks draw on his work to teach methods across disparate themes and disciplines. 

The publishing director at Chatto & Windus said that Graham Rawle's works remained "the gold standard for how to bring art into storytelling" and the graphically charged novels had brought together the editorial and production functions in the business, which is rare for the publishing industry. The CEO of US publisher Cursor went 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".

Graham Rawle (1955-2024): Writer, artist, designer and an extraordinary figure in arts education 

One of the major internationally-recognised talents that helped shape arts education in Brighton in the early twenty-first century, Graham Rawle is remembered with awe and affection by all those who studied or worked with him. 

It was with great sadness that colleagues heard of his death, only a short time after his retirement from teaching at the University of Brighton. 

Cartoonist and musician Danny Noble, author of the graphic novel Shame Pudding, remembers that: “Graham was kind and supportive as well as being a sharp wit. It was a lovely, lucky thing to see the cogs whirring in his talented mind when he was our tutor… it was so bloomin lovely and gave me so much confidence”. While former Comics Laureate and Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, Hannah Berry, sums up Graham Rawle’s appeal to students in a nutshell: “he shared amazing projects … he was such a nice guy”.