Notes on this page
Chapter 4, Page 06
Summary
Jon Osterman recalls a July 1959 trip to New Jersey with Janey Slater: an amusement-park photograph, a broken watch, and an unanswered telephone call lead them to a hotel room and intimacy. Yet his captions collapse that courtship together with Janey’s departure in 1966 and the approaching meteor shower of 1985, turning romance into an event already remembered, lost, and cosmically dwarfed.
Panels
Gibbons adheres to the nine-panel grid, but Moore’s captions make it hold several dates at once. The first row moves from a disembodied hand and falling photograph to public snapshots; the second tracks the broken watch toward Jon’s abstract field of gears; the third narrows into the hotel, then ends on a still life. The preceding page launches the photograph into memory, while the following page converts the watch repair into the fatal laboratory errand.
Environment
The boardwalk’s barker, cheap souvenir photographs, shooting gallery, crowds, and litter give the remembered holiday a convincingly ordinary, commercial texture. That noisy public world steadily contracts into the anonymous hotel room; by panel 8, discarded clothing and the dark window replace the amusement park’s bustle, making privacy feel both intimate and strangely desolate.
Color
The palette moves from the cold black-and-blue cosmic field of panel 1 into the boardwalk’s festive pinks and turquoise, then toward the hotel’s lavender shadows and heavy black. Panel 8 bathes the lovers in warm orange against a dark room, but panel 9 drains human presence away: the pink watch face and yellow flash become bright, isolated signs suspended in darkness.
Symbols
The broken wristwatch is the page’s governing object: its snapped mechanism anticipates both Jon’s vocation as a watchmaker and his later transformation into someone who experiences time as a fixed totality. The circular watch face and scattered gears in panel 6 echo the celestial bodies around them, while the flash in panel 9 visually links a small mechanical failure, sexual climax, and the distant meteor shower.
Themes
This page makes Jon and Janey’s romance inseparable from its ending. His narration does not foreshadow 1966 and 1985 so much as place them beside 1959 as equally present facts, undermining ordinary ideas of choice, suspense, and emotional progression. The effect is poignant rather than merely cerebral: tenderness persists, but Jon’s temporal perspective has already transformed lived experience into an arrangement of inevitable moments.
Graphic Novel Technique
Comics lets the reader see nine discrete moments simultaneously, approximating Jon’s perception of time more directly than a conventionally unfolding scene could. Captions from different years occupy images of 1959, while match cuts—from photograph to souvenir pose, snapped watch to diagrammatic gears, bodily pulse to celestial flash—make the gutters associative rather than simply chronological. This is a particularly sophisticated use of the superhero grid as a model of consciousness.