Notes on this page
Chapter 7, Page 13
Summary
In Dan Dreiberg’s apartment, Laurie’s teasing over coffee turns into mutual flirtation and physical intimacy. Their private encounter unfolds against a television news montage about Max Shea, dimensional-energy research, and Adrian Veidt’s charity performance, so a tentative change in their relationship occurs amid ominous developments neither character is really watching.
Panels
The strict nine-panel grid makes seduction and television montage proceed with identical visual weight. Panels 1, 3, 5, 8, and 9 progressively close in on Dan and Laurie, while the intervening broadcasts jump from news report to laboratory to performance; the regular alternation makes the TV commentary seem to speak accidentally about the couple. The following page intensifies this parallel editing, matching their lovemaking with Veidt’s acrobatics.
Environment
The television and its wider media network dominate the environment: Max Shea’s disappearance, the Institute for Extraspatial Studies, and Veidt’s charity spectacle all belong to the same culture of managed information and corporate celebrity. Even during intimacy, Dan and Laurie remain surrounded by institutions whose apparently unrelated activities will later prove connected; the alternate America enters the home as ambient noise.
Color
John Higgins binds apartment and broadcast through a cool blue-pink-violet palette, preventing the television inserts from feeling like a separate visual world. The strongest disruption is the laboratory’s black doorway in panel 6, a void cut into pale machinery; it gives the report about “extra-dimensional energy sources” an ominous compositional gravity even as Laurie and Dan ignore it.
Symbols
The page’s strongest motif is performance. Laurie calls Dan “ravishing,” Veidt is announced as a public entertainer, and both men are framed as bodies being watched, admired, and evaluated. Dan’s removed glasses add a quieter motif of altered vision: as he stops seeing clearly in the literal sense, desire momentarily releases him from the self-conscious identity through which he usually views himself.
Themes
The page contrasts private vulnerability with public image-making. Dan’s awkwardness softens into confidence as Laurie desires him, while Veidt appears through institutions, announcements, and staged spectacle—a man already converting identity into cultural power. Dramatic irony sharpens the contrast: the lovers treat the broadcast as background entertainment, but the reader is being shown pieces of the hidden design enclosing their supposedly private moment.
Graphic Novel Technique
Comics allows every television fragment to remain physically present on the page while the reader follows the seduction, creating simultaneity rather than a simple cinematic cutaway. Speech balloons bridge separate images and produce double meanings: remarks about being “terrific,” “excited,” or “inhibited” belong to one context while commenting on another. This tightly controlled audiovisual counterpoint is an unusually sophisticated use of the superhero comic’s standard grid.