This page requires a lot of context. The story is about a young woman working in a massive factory. She wants to marry her sweetheart – a guard – but they’ve been denied breeding rights. So they make plans to escape and marry in secret. This is the first page following their escape and it’s a doozy. 

The guard who helped them escape is rewarded for alerting the authorities to the attempted escape. And the punishment for attempted escape is summary execution. It’s a brutal little story, with a twist in the right place to abruptly shift the tone from romance to dystopia.

(Heavy Metal issue #163, July 1996 – Page 74 The Marriage of Irina Valienko by Sicomoro)