Walk into almost any bookstore today and you’ll find an aisle dedicated to a peculiar hybrid — the graphic novel. Combining fantasy with fine art, highbrow concepts with lowbrow caricature, graphic novels are neither literary novels, nor do they necessarily contain any graphic content. While they sometimes rival their literary forebears for length and seriousness, many of them don’t even tell fictional stories — take the example of Art Spiegelman’s Holocaust memoir Maus or Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home. Put simply, graphic novels are comic books — or, more precisely, ‘what comics have become in an age of gentrification.

This formerly popular medium now wins Pulitzer Prizes and American Book Awards, is exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and adapted into arthouse films that include the animated Persepolis and the Palme d’Or winner Blue Is the Warmest Color. As the example of the graphic novel shows, gentrification has become increasingly entwined with culture as it continues to spread across urban neighborhoods and seeps into rural enclaves.

When the sociologist Ruth Glass coined the term “gentrification” in 1964, she was describing how Victorian properties that served as boarding houses for the poor were being converted into representative apartments for London’s bourgeoisie. Today, we are as likely to associate it with the yoga studios and specialty coffee shops now transforming areas which were long home to large working-class and ethnic-minority populations.