Graham Rawle, collagist whose newspaper features and graphic novels revealed a unique comic vision

Graham Rawle, who has died aged 69, was a collage artist, illustrator and graphic novelist who created the humorous “Lost Consonants” series in which he used collage and graphics to illustrate a sentence from which one letter has been removed, thus altering its meaning.

For some 15 years from 1990 Rawle entertained readers of The Guardian, and buyers of such products as Barry’s Tea and Pernod, with a world in which children have leaning difficulties, footballers get camp in their legs, countrymen wear twee jackets and where, after days without water, everyone is really thirty. The series was syndicated to other newspapers, spawned a series of books and proved a valuable teaching aid for dyslexic students.

Rawle created regular series for other newspapers including “When Words Collide” and “Pardon Mrs Arden” for The Sunday Telegraph, while his published books included Woman’s World, an ambitious illustrated 437-page novel composed from words and phrases cut out from women’s journals from between 1958 and 1962.

It told the story of a transvestite, Norma Fontaine, aka Roy Little, living on a council estate in Birmingham, who relies on the words from the magazines to shape her feminine persona. The book began in the traditional way as a word-processed document. Rawle then trawled through magazines, substituting phrases and texts for his own words.

So “He wore a blank expression” became “His face was a tablecloth of plain and simple design”, while a “neurotic’’ woman becomes “a thin worry” of a woman.

The end result, observed a Daily Telegraph reviewer,  was “no mere pastiche: Rawle examines themes of repression and sexuality via unexpected juxtapositions of sentences on subjects as diverse as haircuts and laundry delivery… the novel’s powerful, twisting plot offers a serious interrogation of the sexual stereotypes that can exert such a perverse influence over the vulnerable.”

It took Rawle 1,208 magazines, 37 glue pens, three scissors and five years, working 17 hours a day, to complete the work and its fans included Matt Groening and Raymond Briggs.

Graham Rawle was born on July 22 1955 in Birmingham, the son of Denis Rawle, an electrical engineer, and his wife Jessie, née Fletcher. He was educated at High Storrs Grammar School in Sheffield and studied graphic art and design at Preston Polytechnic.

While there he worked part-time as a waiter in a working men’s pub in Blackpool. Later he worked as a  “smudger”, taking photographs of holidaymakers to be made into plastic keyring viewers: “ I got paid 3p for every photograph I took, and in one day I could make as much as £20, which seemed like a lot then. I’m pretty sure I spent it all on Kentucky Fried Chicken.”

Moving to London, he tried to make it as a songwriter and bass guitarist, even touring the US with a Beatles cover band, before establishing his own graphics studio, where he designed book jackets, advertisements and theatre posters.

In 1988, he met Margaret Huber, an artist and teacher. They married in 1991 and moved to a warehouse home in east London, where a visiting Telegraph interviewer found “a fantastical museum of junk-shop purchases and childhood memories… The frozen-eyed baby dolls, moth-eaten teddy bears, toy guns, cash-registers and clockwork horses are kept in glass display counters, of the sort that used to be found in men’s clothing shops showing off socks.”

Rawle’s first book, The Wonder Book of Fun (1993), was a puzzle and games compendium, while Diary of an Amateur Photographer (1998) was a collage murder mystery.

In 1999 Rawle led a team that designed and built a vast 4,000-square-foot post-apocalyptic Hi-Life supermarket for the Expo 2000 world’s fair in Hanover, Germany, stuffed full of advertising and packaging promoting handmade products with the slogan “You Need This!”

Back in London he founded what he called the Niff group of artists to create “art as a readily available and affordable commodity”. Products included “The Non-Specific Tape Measure” featuring such measurements as “knee high”, “spitting distance” and “too close for comfort”, and a “Cut and Paste Jigsaw Puzzle”, consisting of non-matching pieces from existing jigsaws along with scissors and glue to enable the puzzler to make the pieces fit.

In 2008 he published a reinterpretation of The Wizard of Oz, illustrating L Frank Baum’s original text with images created by mixing collage, photography and home-made models. It won Book of the Year and the Illustrated Book award at the British Book Design and Production awards.

His novel The Card, in which a first-person narrator suffers from apophenia, a tendency to see meaningful connections in unrelated phenomena, was shortlisted for the 2013 Writers’ Guild of Great Britain Book Award. His last book, Overland (2018), was a historically based fantasy in which a Hollywood set designer plays God as he builds an ersatz town to hide an aircraft factory.

Rawle regularly gave lectures about his work. He taught at the University of Brighton for 20 years and was a visiting Professor of Illustration at Falmouth School of Art and Norwich University of the Arts.

His wife survives him.

Graham Rawle, born July 22 1955, died August 16 2024