Notes on this page
Chapter 8, Page 02
Summary
Hollis Mason finishes a warm, teasing telephone conversation with Sally Jupiter, who is living at the Nepenthe Gardens retirement resort and receiving a manicure. Their reminiscence about Laurie, old costumes, and lost youth gives way to a street-level image of young people already dressed for Halloween, beneath the chapter title “OLD GHOSTS.”
Panels
The page uses six regular panels—alternating between the two ends of the telephone call—before opening into a full-width street panel. This shot/reverse-shot rhythm makes distance tangible while preserving intimacy; hands, feet, medicine, the telephone, and domestic objects often stand in for faces. Hollis’s silent act of replacing the receiver in panel 6 creates a clean pause before the wider final image transforms private reminiscence into a public, generational tableau.
Environment
The page contrasts two managed forms of aging: Sally’s bright retirement resort, crowded with pills and beauty treatments, and Hollis’s darker apartment, populated by an old photograph, a costume statuette, and his sleeping dog. References to expensive California calls and “Nixonomics” keep their nostalgia embedded in the book’s alternate, economically anxious 1985 rather than floating free of history.
Color
Sally’s panels are dominated by bright yellows, pinks, and cosmetic reds, while Hollis inhabits heavier purples, blacks, and oranges. The alternation visually separates sunny California from his shadowed New York room, but the final panel recombines those colors in the young people’s costumes, as though fragments of the older generation’s theatrical world have migrated into the street.
Symbols
Costumes are the page’s governing motif. Hollis jokes about squeezing into his “old costume,” while the final panel shows a devil, a hooded figure, and a pirate in Halloween dress: heroic disguise has passed from civic performance into seasonal play, yet masks continue to haunt public life. The enormous title names Hollis and Sally themselves as “old ghosts,” survivors whose identities remain shaped by roles officially abandoned decades earlier.
Themes
The central irony is that Hollis treats costumed adventuring as a harmless, faintly embarrassing past just as masks begin to return around him in more dangerous forms. His affection for Sally and Laurie gives nostalgia genuine human warmth, but “OLD GHOSTS” also warns that the past is active rather than safely concluded: retired heroes, inherited identities, and unresolved violence are all preparing to re-enter the present.
Graphic Novel Technique
Comics lets the telephone conversation occupy two spaces at once, using alternating fragments rather than explanatory narration; the reader supplies the continuity across gutters. The delayed chapter title is especially effective: page 1 begins the conversation before the formal title page, and this page places “OLD GHOSTS” only after the costumed street tableau, turning typography into a retrospective interpretation of everything above it and a hinge toward the following page’s darker memories.