Before even looking at these pages just think of The Big Sleep or if you don't know that film think of The Big Lebowski. Both films feature protagonists who are hired by physically broken men for reasons that may or may not be red herrings. In both films a potential femme fatale may or may not be behind a deeper mystery, and steps in to complicate matters right after our hero's initial meeting with his new employer.
Panel 1 on page 24 with Quinn's face half shadowed immediately brings us out of the world of abstract ideas and iconography on the previous 10 pages into the shady and morally ambiguous territory made familiar to us by decades of films in the noir tradition. At this point, Quinn's motives in taking the case are still unclear, hence our inability to deal with him in strictly black or white terms. Despite the darkness of the room, however, Stillman is represented almost entirely in white indicating if not his innocence then perhaps his ignorance, the possibility that he is just a dupe in this whole game. Virginia Stillman turns on the light in the next panel, yet in the subsequent ones her face his constantly obscured by shadows, throwing her credibility into question. This darkness and obscufation is compounded by her words in which tells Quinn that he mustn't assume Peter is telling the truth, no should he assume that he's lying.
In the first panel on 26, Quinn adopts a gruff approach telling Virginia that her sexual habits don't concern him, but in the world of film noir (more so than in hard boiled fiction) the protaganists are often hyper-sexual despite their no-nonsense pretensions. We can see what Quinn really has on his mind in the third panel. Wonder if he'll see any more of it? And if he does, will he keep his head?
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