Notes on this page
Chapter 2, Page 01
Summary
At a California retirement home, Laurie visits her mother, Sally Jupiter, bringing flowers and trading uneasy jokes about aging; in New York, the Comedian’s funeral proceeds in the rain, with Dr. Manhattan among the mourners. By the page’s end, Sally identifies the murdered man as Eddie Blake, turning casual family conversation into an encounter with painful shared history.
Panels
Gibbons uses the regular nine-panel grid as an editing system, cutting back and forth between two conversations occurring on opposite coasts. Panels 3, 5, 7, and 9 advance the funeral while the others remain with Laurie and Sally; the reader gradually assembles their connection. The final panel supplies the decisive page-ending match: Sally says the past is history as the coffin enters the grave, giving her remark a grim visual completion.
Environment
The page alternates between Sally’s bright, comfortable room and the cemetery’s wet, institutional solemnity. A framed photograph of the Minutemen makes superhero history part of Sally’s domestic décor, while the newspaper report of Blake’s murder intrudes upon that nostalgia: public legend, private memory, and present violence occupy the same world.
Color
John Higgins sharply separates the two strands: Sally’s room is built from warm yellows, pinks, and soft greens, while the funeral is submerged in mauves, blue-grays, and black. Saturated red crosses that boundary through the flowers, guiding the eye across alternating locations and suggesting that the emotional wound beneath Sally’s cheerful surroundings remains vividly present.
Symbols
The red flowers are the page’s strongest visual refrain: Laurie carries them into Sally’s room, Sally holds them against her body, and similar blossoms punctuate the otherwise gray funeral. Their repeated color creates a visual bridge between California and New York, linking affection, remembrance, and death before the dialogue explicitly reveals whose funeral we are watching.
Themes
The page dismantles nostalgia by placing Sally’s fondness for the past beside the burial of one of its celebrated figures. Her insistence that Laurie cannot understand what happened forty years ago raises a central Watchmen problem: public heroic history conceals private injury. “It’s history” sounds dismissive, yet the intercut funeral and Sally’s expression show that history is neither finished nor safely buried.
Graphic Novel Technique
The page makes simultaneity legible without explanatory transitions: recurring rain, flowers, caption boxes, and alternating palettes let two scenes comment upon each other across the gutters. Sally’s dialogue effectively becomes an oblique voice-over for the funeral, although she is speaking elsewhere. This carefully controlled counterpoint—a sophisticated use of the nine-panel grid—allows readers to discover the relationship between scenes at their own pace in a way prose or continuous cinematic editing would handle differently.