Notes on this page
Chapter 2, Page 02
Summary
Laurie visits her mother, Sally Jupiter, at a California retirement home while the page crosscuts to Edward Blake’s rain-soaked funeral in New York. Their argument about surviving the past ends with Laurie extinguishing her cigarette as Sally speaks of dead friends, tightening the connection between private memory and public burial.
Panels
The regular nine-panel grid becomes a crosscutting machine, alternating the warm bedroom conversation with nearly wordless images of the funeral. Sally and Laurie’s dialogue continues across the New York panels, so remarks about washing one’s hands, life going on, and failing health acquire meanings neither speaker consciously intends. The next page abruptly expands into a large burial image, making the page turn feel like the grid opening onto the grave.
Environment
The sunny, landscaped “Penthe Gardens Rest Resort” is set against the cemetery’s iron bars, wet stone, umbrellas, and mud. The contrast makes California look almost aggressively insulated: Sally’s comfortable retirement depends upon closing doors and enjoying the weather while the unresolved history of the Minutemen is literally being lowered into the ground elsewhere.
Color
John Higgins separates the two settings through climate and palette: California uses bright yellows, peach, pink, and green, while New York is compressed into black, gray-violet, and rain-blue. Saturated red flowers recur in both places, visually stitching Sally’s room to Blake’s funeral wreaths; Laurie’s red vest likewise carries the color of memory between scenes that geography keeps apart.
Symbols
Barriers dominate the page: cemetery gates, window frames, and Sally’s advice to “shut” the past away all turn emotional repression into visible architecture. The cigarette supplies the sharpest motif: smoke threads through the domestic scene until Laurie crushes it out and calls it “dead,” converting a casual gesture into an image of mortality immediately before the page-turn revelation of Blake’s coffin.
Themes
The page opposes Sally’s practiced survival to Laurie’s impatience with what that survival has cost. Sally insists that perspective makes horrors smaller and that life continues, yet the funeral images refuse to let the past remain sealed away. Her philosophy is therefore both resilient and troubling: forgetting can preserve a life, but it can also disguise trauma, complicity, and unfinished moral judgment.
Graphic Novel Technique
Comics allows two places and emotional registers to occupy the page simultaneously: readers hear an intimate conversation while studying silent funeral actions, creating irony through juxtaposition rather than exposition. The gutters repeatedly carry speech from California into New York, making Sally’s generalities comment on images she cannot see. This disciplined interweaving of dialogue, montage, and page-turn scale is unusually sophisticated for mainstream superhero comics of the period.