Notes on this page
Chapter 9, Page 11
Summary
At Sally Jupiter’s home, a young Laurie finishes exercising and enters a poolside reunion of the retired Minutemen. Sally affectionately but insistently presents her daughter as a future “super-lady,” then introduces her to Nelson Gardner and Hollis Mason, turning a social gathering into another stage of Laurie’s inherited identity.
Panels
Gibbons uses the regular nine-panel grid to move Laurie from solitary exercise into increasing social enclosure: the first three panels track her across connected rooms, while the remaining six crowd her with greetings, introductions, and adult speech. The page also answers Jon’s question on the previous page—what did all that effort achieve?—with Sally’s nearly identical question about the Minutemen, a verbal match cut from cosmic despair to uneasy nostalgia; the following page then lets the reunion’s buried tensions erupt.
Environment
The private gym, indoor pool, cocktails, and carefully dressed guests place superhero history inside comfortable retirement rather than public action. This affluent domestic setting makes the Minutemen resemble alumni preserving a fading social circle; Laurie enters not a heroic headquarters but a nostalgic institution maintained through anecdotes, photographs, and Hollis’s memoir.
Color
Cool mint walls, pool blue, and gray flooring make Laurie’s exercise space feel controlled and impersonal, while Sally’s saturated red clothing repeatedly captures the eye once Laurie joins the party. That red functions compositionally as maternal gravity: wherever Sally stands, the page’s attention—and Laurie’s social position—organizes around her.
Symbols
The dumbbells establish the central motif of training: Laurie’s body is already being prepared for a role she has not freely chosen. Hollis’s book Under the Hood extends that pressure from physical discipline to narrative inheritance—Laurie is expected both to become the next Silk Spectre and to consume the older generation’s authorized account of itself.
Themes
The reunion exposes nostalgia as a form of power. Sally remembers costumed life as shared accomplishment, yet her teasing question about Laurie becoming “like mom” turns memory into expectation; public heroism is reproduced privately through parental pressure, institutional camaraderie, and selective storytelling. Laurie’s uncertain replies register the gap between an identity celebrated by others and one she has not chosen for herself.
Graphic Novel Technique
Comics allows two histories to occupy the page at once: Laurie’s bodily movement proceeds cleanly through the grid, while conversation continually pulls her backward into the Minutemen’s past and forward toward her imposed future. The reader can hold Jon’s preceding philosophical question, Sally’s echo of it, and the impending disruption on the next page together—an especially sophisticated use of page-to-page verbal rhyming and spatial sequencing.