Colonnades — John Gardiner

Colonnades presents as an existentially thoughtful True Romance style graphic novel (non-visual), à la 2022, with every page (frame) loaded with conflicting temporal-and-spiritual tensions the dramatis personae struggle to resolve.Being-and-Time, Being-and-Nothingness create impactful insights into the central protagonist's self-conscious apprehension of himself as Magnus Storey: why he discovers himself embodied in Australia's racial/cultural/social milieux. He occupies Time composing, illustrating in meditative thought, his own graphic True Romance, a dramatization for the stage, titled: Who Is My Playwright? Both the novel (Colonnades), and the internal dramatization within (Who Is My Playwright?), blend in a Comedy of Manners. They underscore Storey's meditation, how it eventuates that each embodied human persona's existential self-conscious being is pre-scripted through the infallibility of the Law of Conservation of Energy. Existence is themed with powerful tensions through each one's cumulative, habituated inclinations concentrated through Time.The novel's time-frame is focussed within a single month, January 2022, wherein Storey's existential romance unfolds against his immersion within an intense Australian summer: sun, sea, and sand co-join as emblematic to his sensibility of that spiritualised wall the First Zen Patriarch, Bodhidharma, famously contemplated, continuing the Buddha's spiritual transmission mind-to-mind in succession through millennia.