Notes on this page
Chapter 10, Page 02
Summary
President Richard Nixon is transferred from Air Force One by helicopter and motorcade into a fortified mountain command complex while military personnel track his progress. Across the page, ceremonial arrival becomes subterranean confinement: the presidential party moves steadily from open air into the bunker’s sealed interior.
Panels
The strict nine-panel grid converts the arrival into a measured sequence of checkpoints, alternating Nixon’s physical movement with nearly identical reports from the control room. Panels 2 and 9 act as visual brackets: the radar crew first announces the helicopters, then confirms the party’s entry, making bureaucratic language regulate the page’s rhythm. After the expansive landing scene on the previous page, this regular grid compresses space and time; the following page then enlarges panels as Nixon reaches the command center and political conversation replaces transit.
Environment
The aircraft, USAF uniforms, tunnel, checkpoints, radar consoles, and repeated “DEFCON 2” displays build a world where government survives through military infrastructure. Nixon’s presence makes the alternate history immediately legible, while the immense machinery surrounding him suggests that political authority has become inseparable from permanent emergency management.
Color
John Higgins gives each stage a sharply bounded palette: cool aviation blues and greens yield to sickly yellow-green interiors, then to the black-and-orange tunnel and the hot red-orange command area. Because these colors change panel by panel while Nixon’s purple suit remains recognizable, the page feels like movement through successive security zones rather than through a continuous natural space.
Symbols
The page’s controlling motif is descent into enclosure. Aircraft give way to helicopter, road, tunnel, and windowless command room, turning Nixon’s movement into a passage from public visibility toward a hardened underground state; the circular radar screens in panels 2 and 9 reinforce surveillance and recurrence, as though every action is already contained within the system.
Themes
The page presents power as both privileged and trapped. Nixon commands an enormous military apparatus, yet he is passed through it like cargo, his journey narrated by anonymous voices and procedural confirmations; the irony is that the machinery designed to preserve presidential agency also reveals how thoroughly political decision-making is governed by fear, protocol, and anticipated catastrophe.
Graphic Novel Technique
Comics allows Nixon’s journey and the monitoring of that journey to coexist on the same page: readers repeatedly leave the motorcade for the radar room, then return with new knowledge of its progress. The near-repetition of panels 2 and 9 works like a visual refrain with altered dialogue, while the fixed grid lets readers perceive the whole descent at once—a particularly sophisticated use of montage and spatial compression for mainstream superhero comics of the period.