Notes on this page
Chapter 7, Page 17
Summary
Dan and Laurie lie together in Dan’s bedroom after an unsuccessful sexual encounter; Laurie comforts him while shame and anxiety overwhelm him. The page moves from strained intimacy, through brief returns to Dan’s apocalyptic dream imagery, to an interruption at the door—apparently Rorschach—which abruptly redirects the scene.
Panels
The page modifies the nine-panel grid into ten panels, using three broad panels above, four across the middle, and three below. Dan and Laurie’s slow, heavy gestures occupy the larger frames, while the two narrow central panels flash back to dream images like involuntary mental insert shots; the final row then restores sequential movement as Dan rises, crosses the room, and the unseen visitor speaks from behind the door.
Environment
The bedroom’s medicine bottles, discarded reading matter, rumpled sheets, and cool, institutional-looking walls make intimacy feel clinical and depleted rather than romantic. The looming shadows visually enlarge Dan’s private distress, while the ordinary door and bedside setting allow the masked world to intrude almost absurdly into domestic embarrassment.
Color
Cool blue flesh, mauve bedding, and violet walls drain the bedroom of warmth, turning the couple’s bodies almost spectral. Against that subdued palette, the inserted yellow-orange explosion and stark black skeletons flare with terrible intensity: apocalypse is more vivid in Dan’s mind than the living woman beside him, a color contrast that gives his emotional paralysis visible form.
Symbols
Panels 5 and 6 repeat the mushroom cloud and embracing skeletons from the previous page, making the strongest motif unmistakable: erotic union has become entangled with annihilation in Dan’s imagination. His hands clasping Laurie’s acquire inkblot-like black shapes, suggesting that the failure is psychological—fear, death, and the masked identity he has suppressed are invading physical intimacy.
Themes
The page links Dan’s impotence to a broader crisis of masculine identity: civilian respectability has not freed him from his former heroic self but left him divided, nostalgic, and frightened. The interruption is therefore thematically apt—Rorschach’s masked world returns at precisely the moment Dan’s ordinary adult identity fails him, beginning the movement by which danger and costume will restore his sense of agency.
Graphic Novel Technique
Comics lets the page place present action and remembered dream images in one stable design, so the reader can linger over the disturbing equation between sex and nuclear death rather than receiving it as a fleeting film cut. The repeated images carried across the page turn make memory materially visible, while the last panel’s speech balloons precede any view of the speaker, using the gutter and page turn to make an unseen voice breach the bedroom.