Notes on this page
Chapter 7, Page 16
Summary
Sleeping beside Laurie in her apartment, Dan dreams of an erotic encounter in which bodies, lovers, and costumed identities continually replace one another. Desire culminates not in fulfillment but in a nuclear flash and the image of embracing skeletons, after which Dan wakes sweating and alarmed.
Panels
The page uses seventeen silent panels arranged across three tiers, with unusually narrow vertical frames breaking the dream into flashes rather than continuous action. Repeated embraces become visual match cuts: clothing disappears, faces change, costumes materialize, and the lovers pass into explosion and X-ray-like skeletons. The widened final panel releases this compression as Dan wakes; on the following page, the blast and skeleton images recur, proving the nightmare has not ended psychologically.
Environment
Most of the page suppresses environment altogether: black fields isolate bodies as if the dream has stripped away ordinary social reality. Only the final panel restores Laurie’s bedroom, its cool walls and bedside clutter abruptly returning Dan—and the reader—to material space, though his terror shows that the dream’s political anxiety cannot be contained outside it.
Color
Black backgrounds turn the figures into isolated, theatrical displays, while flesh tones, crimson hair, and the russet Nite Owl costume carry the eye through each metamorphosis. The warm erotic palette is violently overtaken by the yellow-white nuclear flare and then stark black bones; the final cool blue-violet bedroom feels less soothing than drained, as though Dan wakes in the blast’s afterimage.
Symbols
Masks and nakedness do not form simple opposites here. Dan’s glasses give way to the round-eyed Nite Owl mask, while the woman shifts between sexual fantasy, Laurie, and costumed femininity; identity appears as a succession of performances laid over vulnerable bodies. The lovers’ final transformation into skeletons joins erotic union to the book’s recurring nuclear doomsday imagery.
Themes
Dan’s dream binds masculinity, sexual anxiety, superhero nostalgia, and nuclear fear into one sequence. His desire becomes possible only through costumes and changing roles, suggesting that the heroic identity meant to empower him also mediates—and perhaps obstructs—intimacy. The atomic climax enlarges private impotence into the era’s public terror: even successful union is imagined as annihilation.
Graphic Novel Technique
Because the page has no words, meaning arises through the reader’s comparison of adjacent frozen images: glasses become a mask, partners change identity, an embrace becomes a nuclear silhouette, and flesh becomes bone. The preceding page’s command to “Just sleep” acquires grim irony across the page turn, while the repeated nightmare fragments on the next page make comics’ spatial recurrence function like involuntary memory—separate moments remaining visibly present together.