I an introductory note to 'An anthology of graphic fiction' Ivan Brunetti describes the graphic novel as a person now comfortably in it's thirties after passing through it's adolescence in the 1920's and evloving from comic strips to multilayered complexities of longer stories and into the field of the excistential state of the human condition.The styles and varity of graphic novels now have made them a new form of expression or more so an evolved form of an earlier type of story telling.

The caption above by John Hankiewicz - 'A paragraph by Saul Bellow (1915 - 2005)
Is prose really and is beautifully married with the visual narrative.In each caption the direction of the felt lines increases an sense of motion around the figures in the scenes. There is a constant animated presence created by the horizontal and verticle lines in the walls ,table tops and floors.This animated sense is vacant in the figures which become a serene nagative in an otherwise active composition. In a sense the nature surrounding the scene, wether it be the chairs ,the trees the streets all reflect the substance Of Saul Bellow but not in the people. I look at this graphic strip in much the same manner as the writer talks of Saul Bellow. It is a strip that I have returned to many times and always find great satisfaction in. I will admit that there are not many masterpieces in graphic novels yet but there are few I believe in any expression, what there are is moments of a masterpiece as in Saul Bellow's paragraph or John Hankiewicz's stripe.