Notes on this page
Chapter 5, Page 21
Summary
At a Manhattan newsstand, Bernard the newsvendor banters with Joey, the Promethean cab driver, while nearby men discuss geopolitical danger and activists distribute literature. Over the page, captions from the marooned sailor’s “Black Freighter” story move from the shark’s death to his grim decision to eat it, turning an ordinary street scene steadily darker.
Panels
Gibbons restores the strict nine-panel grid after the previous page’s larger, violently irregular sea panels, exchanging physical crisis for controlled urban simultaneity. Each street vignette occupies the same measured space while the captions advance a second narrative across them; the regular rhythm makes New York seem stable, yet the sailor’s escalating horror steadily contaminates that appearance. The next page narrows this diffuse anxiety into Detective Fine’s telephone call and a concrete lead.
Environment
The newsstand compresses the chapter’s anxious alternate America into advertisements and overheard talk: Hustler, the Promethean Cab Company, fears about Afghanistan and Pakistan, and a “Gay Women Against Rape” poster. Public life becomes a noisy marketplace where sex, activism, labor, and nuclear-age geopolitics compete for attention while catastrophe approaches unnoticed.
Color
John Higgins separates the interwoven narratives without fully isolating them: the street is dominated by dusty mauves, browns, and sickly greens, while panel 7’s miniature seascape drops into stark black, turquoise, and orange. The activists’ pink poster then carries some of that heightened intensity back into the city, visually binding distant horror to contemporary social conflict.
Symbols
Sharks provide the page’s strongest connective motif. In the captions they change from predators into food, marking the sailor’s moral and physical degradation; on the street, vulnerable people are likewise imagined as “morsels” amid political threat. “Promethean” light offers an ironic counter-image: Joey’s vulgar dismissal undercuts any heroic fantasy of bringing enlightenment to this world.
Themes
The page turns survival into a question of moral transformation. The sailor rationalizes eating the shark as necessity, even as he recognizes that the act is making his raft—and himself—grotesque; around him, New Yorkers casually discuss danger, exploitation, and vulnerability. This doubling prepares the novel’s larger ethical problem: whether an emergency can justify an abhorrent means, and what such justification does to the person who accepts it.
Graphic Novel Technique
The page depends on comics’ capacity to make two stories occupy the same time and space. The reader can follow the street dialogue, the pirate captions, or their ironic collisions—“safe” over a precarious urban exchange, “hateful” beside political activism—at a self-chosen pace. This sustained counterpoint, a particularly sophisticated use of embedded narrative for mainstream superhero comics of the period, makes the comic-within-the-comic function as ethical commentary rather than decorative subplot.