Notes on this page
Chapter 7, Page 12
Summary
Dan and Laurie watch television in Dan’s apartment while news reports move from Rorschach’s arrest to escalating international conflict and political violence. Their flirtatious ease gives way to Laurie’s anxiety, while Dan admits that the mounting crisis frightens him as well.
Panels
The strict nine-panel grid becomes an editing machine, alternating broadcast images with Dan and Laurie in panels 2, 4, 6, and 8. This regular public/private rhythm steadily erodes the distinction between the two: the news moves from commentary to tanks and injured demonstrators, while the domestic shots tighten from a two-shot to Laurie’s anxious close-up, then widen only enough to show the couple huddled together. The previous page introduces the television report; this page intensifies it into geopolitical montage, preparing the following page’s uneasy turn toward sex and escapism.
Environment
The television compresses this alternate 1985 into a parade of institutions and flashpoints: Hector Godfrey defends Rorschach, Malcolm Long begins examining Kovacs, Soviet forces move through Afghanistan, and women protesting at Greenham Common clash with police. The accumulation makes Dan’s living room feel less like a refuge than a receiving station for institutional fear.
Color
John Higgins separates the apartment’s mauves, pinks, and cool blue shadows from the news footage’s khaki greens, military ochres, and smoky oranges. Yet the palettes bleed across the grid rather than forming secure zones: Laurie’s face in panel 6 is chilled blue while Dan’s orange clothing echoes the hotter broadcast imagery, visually importing the crisis into their intimacy.
Symbols
The television is the page’s governing motif: a rectangular frame within the comics page that turns politics, war, and suffering into interchangeable images. Dan and Laurie repeatedly appear beside or partly behind cups, steam, and the screen’s jagged sound balloons, suggesting private life being penetrated by distant events; the violence is mediated, but no longer emotionally remote.
Themes
The page makes political fear inseparable from private desire. Laurie asks whether the news frightens Dan or whether she alone is reacting; his answer acknowledges shared vulnerability, but the next page redirects that anxiety into flirtation. The sequence therefore treats intimacy as both genuine comfort and temporary evasion, while the television’s escalating montage shows institutions—press, psychiatry, government, and police—struggling to interpret or contain disorder.
Graphic Novel Technique
Comics lets the reader hold all nine moments in view at once, so the television reports do not simply pass and disappear as they would on an actual broadcast. Their images remain spatially adjacent to Dan and Laurie’s embraces, allowing tanks, coffee, police violence, and romantic unease to coexist on the page. This disciplined intercutting is a particularly sophisticated use of the superhero-comic grid: global catastrophe advances not through spectacle alone, but through the pressure that spectacle exerts on an ordinary room.