Notes on this page
Chapter 2, Cover
Summary
A rain-soaked close-up of a cemetery angel introduces Chapter II: water runs down its damaged stone face while leaves and urban buildings recede behind it. The image establishes mourning before the following page identifies the occasion as Edward Blake’s funeral and begins cutting between the cemetery and Laurie’s visit with her mother.
Panels
There is no conventional sequence here: the chapter opener functions as one immense establishing image, with the narrow black title strip acting almost like a second panel. Its extreme close-up withholds the cemetery’s full geography until the following page, where the angel appears at a distance; that reversal turns an initially monumental face into one object within the funeral scene.
Environment
The cemetery is not pastoral refuge but part of the modern city: iron fencing, antennas, rooftops, and a distant skyscraper press close behind the monument. Rain, windblown leaves, and grime make the memorial feel exposed and neglected, preparing the following page’s funeral setting while denying death any comforting separation from ordinary urban life.
Color
Cold blues, blue-violets, and pale stone dominate the image, making the cemetery feel saturated by rain and emotional chill. The salmon-orange chapter lettering and clock face sharply oppose that palette, so the graphic apparatus remains visually insistent beside the mournful scene; on the following page, the same muted violets carry directly into the funeral panels.
Symbols
The angel’s apparent tears are the page’s governing motif, yet the effect comes from rain running over indifferent stone; the white splatter on its forehead further undercuts devotional dignity. Beside it, the chapter clock brings time and death together, continuing Watchmen’s recurring countdown imagery and suggesting that private mourning unfolds inside a larger movement toward catastrophe.
Themes
The page begins the chapter by questioning how the dead are remembered. A monumental angel promises permanence and consolation, but weather, stains, and the surrounding commercial city expose that promise as fragile; this prepares a chapter concerned with Blake’s public identity, the private histories recalled after his death, and nostalgia’s inability to make violence noble.
Graphic Novel Technique
The opener makes the page turn do narrative work: readers first confront an enigmatic, nearly abstract stone face, then discover on the next page that it belongs to the cemetery overlooking Blake’s funeral. Comics can preserve both scales in the reader’s memory at once, allowing the close-up’s seeming grief to haunt the later long shot while the title clock quietly frames mourning as countdown.