Notes on this page
Chapter 7, Page 15
Summary
In Dan’s apartment, Laurie tries to reassure him after their lovemaking falters; television coverage of Adrian Veidt’s effortless charity performance continues beside them, followed by the news, a film introduction, and the station’s sign-off. As the broadcast ends, embarrassment gives way to exhausted tenderness: Laurie settles beside Dan and tells him to sleep.
Panels
The regular nine-panel grid makes two actions occupy the same measured rhythm: the televised spectacle and the awkward encounter on the couch. Dialogue crosses visual boundaries so that Veidt’s “perfect” dismount, the announcer’s praise, and Dan’s apologies collide with cruel comic precision; the final row then slows abruptly from Laurie’s movement, to blank static, to the nearly silent dark still life.
Environment
The television supplies the room’s public world: Veidt as polished celebrity athlete, genial news anchors joking about Cold War antagonists, an ABC-style ident, and finally static. This stream of entertainment and political anxiety continues almost indifferently beside the couple’s private distress, making mass media feel like both background noise and an inadequate shield against intimacy.
Color
Warm reds and pinks bind Laurie and Dan’s bodies to the apartment, while Veidt’s saturated orange and purple stand brilliantly against the television’s black stage. The page progressively drains that theatrical intensity: pale broadcast graphics, white static, and the black final panel guide the eye from exposed bodies and public performance toward fatigue, quiet, and emotional withdrawal.
Symbols
The clock in panel 3 and the station ident in panel 6 emphasize time passing while Dan remains emotionally and physically stalled. More pointedly, the television turns Veidt into Dan’s double: the poised, muscular Ozymandias completes a “perfect” routine just as the former Nite Owl cannot perform, sharpening the novel’s recurring divide between heroic image and vulnerable private identity.
Themes
The page dismantles superhero masculinity through juxtaposition rather than argument. Veidt appears disciplined, graceful, and applauded while Dan experiences impotence and shame; yet Laurie’s patient reassurance redirects the scene away from masculine achievement toward care. The irony is that the ordinary human response—kindness in failure—carries more moral weight than the televised hero’s immaculate performance.
Graphic Novel Technique
Comics lets several soundtracks coexist on the same page without editing one into dominance: television commentary, lovers’ speech, applause, news patter, and static remain spatially attached to separate images yet continually contaminate one another. The reader can pause over these accidental verbal-image correspondences, a particularly sophisticated use of the nine-panel grid that film would have to impose sequentially through cuts and timing.