Notes on this page
Chapter 2, Page 12
Summary
At Edward Blake’s rain-soaked funeral, Dr. Manhattan stands among the mourners while the minister’s prayer continues over the open grave. The sight of Blake’s coffin and roses carries Manhattan into a memory of Vietnam, where the Comedian dismisses the holiday fireworks with bitter cynicism.
Panels
One enormous, vertiginous overhead panel makes the mourners look small around the grave, with Manhattan conspicuous at the composition’s center. Beneath it, four narrow panels tighten progressively onto his face before opening into the Vietnam flashback: an elegant cinematic zoom transformed into comics rhythm. The preceding page ends in intimate prayer, while this page enlarges that prayer into ceremony and then fractures it through memory.
Environment
The cemetery is rendered as a public ritual of respectability: umbrellas, dark formal clothes, flowers, and a coffin marked with the American flag surround Blake’s grave. That patriotic emblem becomes pointed when the page shifts to Vietnam, exposing the violent alternate history concealed beneath the ceremonial honors granted to a government-sponsored hero.
Color
The funeral is dominated by wet olive ground, blue-gray rain, black clothing, and Manhattan’s icy skin, with the roses providing a concentrated red accent. The firework’s sudden yellow, white, and red flare ruptures this subdued palette; the final panel carries those hot colors into Vietnam’s black night, making memory feel less recalled than explosively ignited.
Symbols
The crucial motif is the firework. A bright burst beside Manhattan’s head initially seems to belong to the funeral’s visual field, then the final panel reveals it as the hinge into Vietnam; celebration and explosion become almost indistinguishable. The American insignia on the coffin likewise binds Blake’s death to the nation whose power he served and brutalized.
Themes
The page dismantles the comforting fiction of a coherent public legacy. Blake is buried with prayers, flowers, and patriotic honors, yet Manhattan remembers a man who treated war, national celebration, and death with the same corrosive contempt. The juxtaposition activates one of Watchmen’s central tensions: institutions can manufacture heroic appearances without cleansing the violence performed in their name.
Graphic Novel Technique
The page makes memory spatial. Readers can see the grave, Manhattan’s narrowing close-ups, the ambiguous explosion, and its Vietnam context at once, yet encounter them sequentially at their own pace. The firework functions as a graphic match cut across the gutter, while the minister’s prayer continues over images that silently loosen from the present—a particularly sophisticated fusion of montage, page design, and psychological transition.