When the Man Booker longlist was announced earlier this year, there were various surprises and revelations that set people muttering, not least the inclusion of Nick Drnaso’s Sabrina. A powerful account of a missing woman, chilling in its seamless distillation of our current political and cultural climate, it was the first-ever graphic novel to be recognised by the prestigious literary award.

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It comes at an increasingly visible time for the graphic novel. In 2016 the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature was scooped by John Lewis for his extraordinary civil rights memoir March: Book Three, a trilogy focused on the 1965 march in Selma, written by Lewis and Andrew Aydin, with illustrations by Nate Powell. More recently Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home, a graphic memoir of queer coming-of-age and fraught family relations, was adapted as a musical at London’s Young Vic, where it received rave reviews.

© Courtesy of Drawn and Quartely

Alongside these various accolades and newsworthy moments, recent years have also seen a slew of other brilliant graphic novel publications. From Isabel Greenberg’s The One Hundred Nights of Hero and Tillie Walden’s On a Sunbeam to Liv Strömquist’s Fruit of Knowledge and Thi Bui’s The Best We Could Do, it’s a genre that more and more readers are turning to for its nuanced explorations of identity, sexuality, politics and power dynamics, as well as the foregrounding of more traditionally marginalised voices.

This autumn sees the publication of two particularly exciting graphic novels. American illustrator Liana Finck’s Passing for Human is a clever, elegiac autobiography circling around parents, origin stories and what it means to create. “It’s a book about losing myself,” Finck says. “I call the self a shadow in the book, and I embody it as this lost shadow being who used to follow me around and has disappeared… The book is a series of attempts to figure out what she meant and how to get her back.”

© Courtesy of Jonathan Cape Penguin

UK illustrator Posy Simmonds – best known for her graphic novels including Gemma Bovery and Tamara Drewe, both of which have been adapted into films – returns with a new offering this November in the form of Cassandra Darke. It’s a contemporary tale of greed and intrigue she describes as “deal[ing] with a woman who is very selfish and large, and doesn’t conform to any female stereotype... It’s about London – and parts of London that have no lights on at night… lots of places around Knightsbridge and Kensington that are empty. It also deals with other bits of London – the glitzy bits and the rather gritty, impoverished bits.”

Given that Simmonds has been publishing her works for years, has she seen a surge in interest recently? “When I first did my graphic novels – which were serialised in The Guardian and then became books – with Gemma Bovery it wasn’t called a graphic novel, just a serial. They’ve been around quite a long time, but at the moment they’re growing and growing.”

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It’s a phenomenon that Ella Bucknall, a London-based illustrator and founder of Whip – the first zine to focus exclusively on female-led political cartooning – attributes to a very particular set of contemporary concerns. “It seems to me that over the past few years, whilst the political climate has been so turbulent, cartoons have become far more prolific,” she reflects. “Even more traditional illustrators have taken to drawing political cartoons because to create a piece of art – even just a frame – in response to political injustice feels empowering. It's a small act of protest.”

This growth in the popularity of both graphic novels and cartooning has also been echoed on the catwalk – various designers both playing with and paying homage to the possibilities of placing words and illustrations on clothing.

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Grace Wales Bonner’s autumn 2018 menswear collection drew on a variety of black and white graphics, while Ashley Williams’ spring/summer 2019 collection included similarly monochromatic patterns resembling something from the pages of a zine. Elsewhere in London for spring/summer 2019, both Richard Quinn and Rejina Pyo made nods to pop art with a profusion of Ben Day-esque dots; Christopher Kane presented a series of slogan tees covered in praying mantis drawings accompanied by the words “Sexual Cannibalism”; and Riccardo Tisci’s Burberry debut saw blocks of text and image combined to intriguing – and sometimes tongue-in-cheek – effect.

Further afield graphic cityscape prints were also found in both Akris’ and Prada’s spring/summer 2019 collections – the former gloomy and monochrome (a homage to Romanian mixed-media artist Geta Brătescu), the latter rendered collage-style in a variety of brighter colour palettes. Miuccia Prada is a long-term admirer of a good illustration – both her spring 2018 menswear and womenswear collections drew heavily on comic motifs. Each show was set against a backdrop of painted panels echoing the images scattered across the clothes. As Prada told Vogue after her womenswear show featuring eight female cartoonists and manga artists’ works from the '30s through to the present day: “I found it inspiring that with a pencil in your hand, you can tell your life.”

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Predictably, Jeremy Scott has also drawn heavily from the world of graphic novels. His spring/summer 2019 collection saw models walking down the runway bearing embroidered words like “Revolt” and “Power” (as well as “Jeremy Scott”) in punchy neon and white fonts that looked like they’d escaped the pages of an action-packed cartoon – accompanied elsewhere by actual cartoon animals and Pikachu prints blazoned across sweatshirts and tees. The theme continued under a more refined guise at Moschino where the models themselves were rendered walking illustrations – Scott covering a variety of suits, tights and ballgowns in meticulous scribbles, as though each garment had been brought to life with a few strokes of a felt-tip pen.

Scott is not shy of utilising a good cartoon motif – his autumn/winter 2018 Moschino offering included a collaboration with artist Ben Frost on a series of garishly bright graphics with a charged undercurrent – his accompanying narrative of '60s conspiracy theories, aliens and Establishment cover-ups finding potential parallels with modern-day uncertainty. (It’s also worth noting that Scott took his bow after his eponymous spring/summer 2019 collection wearing a T-shirt bearing the message “TELL YOUR SENATOR NO ON KAVANAUGH”.)

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In an era of fake news and a bewildering number of ways of disseminating information (something captured brilliantly in Drnaso’s Sabrina), it’s also unsurprising to see plenty of designers turn to newsprint patterning too – most prominently in Comme des Garçons’ spring/summer 2019 collection.

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These more political elements – especially in the case of Prada – are something Bucknall finds especially exciting. “I am completely in love with all Brigid Deacon's illustrations for Prada. I remember buying one of her zines, Coma Deep, online years ago, before I ever thought that I might be an illustrator… Comics have always been viewed as such a kind of geeky boys' thing – all superheroes and sexy women with unrealistic boobs in latex – so seeing women draw women in comics feels so cool and radical, and obviously just looks amazing on a coat.”

Just as the graphic novel has so often proved to be the ideal space for themes ranging from the deeply personal to the radically political, so what we wear offers up all sorts of potential too – especially when it comes to exploring stories about both ourselves and the world around us.

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Both Finck and Simmonds recognise the graphic novel’s unique storytelling capacity. “I think it’s a good format for mixing the real with the emotional,” Finck says. “Like in writing you’d be called a magic realist if you mixed up a fantastical character that embodies an idea with a real character – there’s a lot of machinery behind it. But in a comic it comes really naturally to do that, and I think the flattening of word and image is also so appealing.” Simmonds agrees, “I’ve always liked the combination of words and pictures. A picture can do what words can’t do – comics have got a filmic quality and sometimes you don’t need any words at all. I like the silence. But words can also do some things that would be too laborious for the pictures to do.”

Perhaps the combination of images and words placed on clothes take those ideas into a different realm again. Depending on how they’re utilised, there they take on new meanings – pages replaced with fabric, the body becoming another kind of vehicle for embodying a narrative, a message, an entertaining image, a serious idea glimpsed in passing.