Notes on this page
Chapter 7, Page 05
Summary
Inside Archie, Dan and Laurie move from embarrassed talk about his childhood fantasies to a warmer exchange about the people and interests that shaped him: birds, aviation, and Hollis Mason. As Dan continues inspecting the ship, Laurie puts on one of his spare costumes, turning nostalgic conversation into tentative participation in his former heroic life.
Panels
The strict nine-panel grid gives the visit a measured, exploratory rhythm. Panels 1–6 alternate between Archie’s artifacts and the pair’s conversation, letting each object unlock another layer of Dan’s biography; panels 7 and 8 repeat nearly the same cockpit framing, slowing time around his confession of Hollis’s influence. Panel 9 then provides the page-turn hinge: Laurie’s costume abruptly converts reminiscence into action, continued by their handshake on the following page.
Environment
Archie’s interior resembles both a workshop and a private museum: cabinets, machinery, photographs, and stored costumes preserve Dan’s abandoned identity in material form. The Twilight Lady photograph adds a trace of sexual and superhero history, while Dan’s Harvard-trained engineering and inherited wealth show how privilege made his elaborate fantasy physically possible.
Color
John Higgins separates memory from machinery through sharp palette shifts: pale blue-green reflections and lavender storage spaces surround the conversation, while the cockpit panels plunge into black, yellow, and orange. Laurie’s red-and-white costume then emerges crisply against the cool interior, making her decision the page’s visual climax and lending new energy to Dan’s subdued world.
Symbols
The strongest motif is the owl-eye reflection in panel 1, which follows the previous page’s close-up of Archie’s circular window. Dan and Laurie appear miniaturized inside the great mechanical “eye,” making the ship both an object of wonder and a lens through which Dan still sees himself; masks here are not merely disguises but instruments for recovering a desired identity.
Themes
The page treats nostalgia as both embarrassment and a possible route back to agency. Dan calls his owl fantasy childish and admits that he idolized Hollis, yet the objects around him prove that such fantasies produced genuine knowledge, craft, and achievement. Laurie’s willingness to dress up gently changes the power dynamic: she stops merely examining Dan’s past and begins consenting to share it.
Graphic Novel Technique
The page makes biography spatial: instead of delivering Dan’s history as a continuous flashback, Moore and Gibbons let Laurie—and the reader—open cabinets, examine photographs, and look across the cockpit. Separate moments remain visible together in the grid, so childhood fantasy, erotic memory, technical expertise, and present intimacy accumulate at once. This is a particularly sophisticated use of sequential storytelling: character revelation occurs through movement among images and objects, not exposition alone.