Notes on this page
Chapter 7, Page 14
Summary
Dan and Laurie begin making love in Dan’s apartment while the television broadcasts Adrian Veidt’s charity gymnastics performance at the New York Astrodome. As Veidt executes each movement with effortless control, Dan becomes hesitant and asks Laurie to let him take over, turning the broadcast into an increasingly pointed counterpoint to their awkward intimacy.
Panels
The strict nine-panel grid alternates between the lovers and the televised routine, creating a montage in which separate actions seem to comment on each other. Broadcast phrases such as “confidence,” “maneuver,” and “not the slightest tremor or effort” cross the gutters into Dan’s difficulty, producing irony without an explicit narrator. Panel 9 ends with Veidt switching his grip, a suspended movement carried across the page turn into Dan’s continuing crisis and Veidt’s eventual dismount.
Environment
The television carries the page’s larger world into the bedroom: a Veidt “Nostalgia” advertisement gives way to Ozymandias performing for an Indian famine appeal. Superheroism has become a corporate-media spectacle—Veidt sells perfume, celebrity, philanthropy, and his own perfected body—while Dan’s former heroic identity survives only as private memory and frustrated desire.
Color
John Higgins binds the two locations with saturated pinks, purples, and reds: Laurie’s clothing and Dan’s bedding visually rhyme with Ozymandias’s costume, making the erotic and athletic performances feel uncomfortably continuous. Against the television’s black, star-like arena and yellow spotlight, Veidt reads as a sharply controlled icon, while the bedroom’s paler blue-gray setting makes Dan’s body appear softer, enclosed, and vulnerable.
Symbols
Performance is the governing motif. Ozymandias appears costumed, spotlit, and masterful before a crowd, whereas Dan is unmasked, partly hidden, and anxious before an audience of one; the contrast turns physical competence into a question of identity. The horizontal bar also acquires a suggestive double function, linking Veidt’s disciplined grip to Dan’s uncertain attempt to regain control.
Themes
The page exposes the gap between public image and private reality through a cruel comparison of masculine performances. Veidt embodies the polished, marketable ideal—youthful, charitable, physically sovereign—while Dan, watching from retirement, cannot command his own body with similar ease. Laurie’s reassurance is tender, but the broadcast turns Dan’s embarrassment into a broader crisis of nostalgia: the heroic past cannot simply be recovered by reenacting it.
Graphic Novel Technique
This is a sophisticated use of comics’ capacity for simultaneity: the reader can hold bedroom and broadcast together on the same page, allowing dialogue from one scene to become figurative commentary on the other. Unlike film cross-cutting, the fixed grid leaves all nine moments visibly present, so Veidt’s flawless poses and Dan’s faltering gestures can be compared at the reader’s chosen pace; the gutters create the ironic connections.