Notes on this page
Chapter 5, Page 20
Summary
The castaway of “Tales of the Black Freighter” discovers that sharks have consumed the bodies supporting his raft, then battles a huge, strangely colored shark. Wounded and nearly overwhelmed, he kills it with a broken mast and sails onward, but survival has brought him into an unsettling intimacy with the violence he fears.
Panels
Six panels form a tightly balanced pattern of narrow-wide, wide-narrow, narrow-wide rows. That near-mirror structure disciplines an eruption of violent action: discovery expands into attack, attack contracts around the impaling mast, and the final broad panel releases the raft forward. The preceding page’s quiet bedtime close becomes a page-turn plunge into nightmare; the following page then fragments the tale among street scenes.
Environment
The page abandons Dan’s quiet bedroom for an artificial, nightmarish ocean made of corpses, wreckage, foam, and circling fins. Because the previous page shows the comic beside Dan’s bed, this maritime world functions as an embedded cultural artifact: lurid popular entertainment whose apocalyptic anxieties echo those of the supposedly more realistic world surrounding it.
Color
The in-story palette is violently saturated: acidic yellow, turquoise, violet, orange, and blood red contend against large black seas and skies. Rather than modeling natural light, these complementary clashes flatten the images into feverish poster-like planes; the shark’s “pale and mottled yellow” body becomes less zoological than hallucinatory, as though terror itself had acquired color.
Symbols
The shark is the page’s crucial double: predator and victim, external monster and distorted reflection of the mariner himself. His claim that they “knew each other,” reinforced by their shared blood and struggle around the same mast, anticipates his moral transformation—his desperate resistance to monstrosity is precisely what begins to make him monstrous.
Themes
The page makes survival indistinguishable from moral compromise. The mariner endures by using the dead as flotation and answering predation with intimate, bloody violence; his victory therefore supplies no ethical reassurance. This logic foreshadows Watchmen’s larger question: when catastrophe seems inevitable, how much horror can a person commit while continuing to imagine himself its opponent?
Graphic Novel Technique
Comics lets the embedded tale occupy the whole page, temporarily erasing the frame narrative while still allowing the reader to remember the comic lying beside Dan’s bed. Caption and image also pull differently: the retrospective prose tries to organize experience into heroic ordeal, while the grotesque pictures expose panic, bodily degradation, and self-deception—a sophisticated use of a story-within-a-story uncommon in mainstream superhero comics of the period.