Notes on this page
Chapter 2, Page 15
Summary
In a Vietnamese bar, the pregnant woman whom Blake has shot lies bleeding while Dr. Manhattan refuses to intervene; Blake then indicts Jon for watching the killing despite possessing the power to prevent it. As Blake leaves to find a medic, the flashback ends and the page returns to his funeral, transforming an accusation made in anger into an unresolved moral judgment.
Panels
The page modifies the nine-panel grid: its enlarged second panel makes the woman’s collapsed body impossible to treat as a passing detail, while the remaining panels tighten into an accusatory exchange of close and medium shots. Jon’s nearly motionless presence contrasts with Blake’s wounded agitation. The final panel cuts abruptly to the funeral, where the minister’s words complete a page-turn out of memory and into ritual.
Environment
The bar’s shutters, bottles, worn boards, and fragments of commercial signage keep the violence embedded in an ordinary civilian space rather than a heroic battlefield. Blake’s casual search for a medic after committing the shooting deepens the scene’s moral ugliness: American power appears here as occupation, entitlement, and improvised damage control.
Color
Jon’s cool, luminous blue makes him visually immaculate against the bar’s hot oranges, reds, and bruised purples. That purity is bitterly ironic: Blake is literally stained with blood, yet Jon’s clean figure does not signify innocence. The palette separates physical culpability from moral detachment, while the funeral panel drains the heat into rain-soaked violet and black.
Symbols
Blood on Blake’s gloved hand visually contaminates the yellow smiley badge on his chest, anticipating the blood-streaked badge that opens the novel. The motif binds this wartime murder to his later death: the public emblem of comedy and uncomplicated feeling becomes inseparable from violence, guilt, and the terrible joke Blake believes history to be.
Themes
Blake’s charge identifies one of the novel’s central problems: extraordinary power does not automatically produce responsibility. His argument is self-serving—he uses Jon’s inaction to dilute his own guilt—but it is not therefore false. Jon could have altered the event effortlessly, and the page exposes how his growing distance from humanity can resemble complicity rather than transcendence.
Graphic Novel Technique
Comics allows the reader to hold accusation and evidence together: the woman’s body remains visually present across the page even as Blake and Jon debate responsibility. The gutter before the funeral performs a temporal leap, but the minister’s burial language answers the flashback retrospectively. This dense ethical montage—action, argument, and memorial ritual occupying one designed surface—is a particularly sophisticated use of mainstream superhero form.