Notes on this page
Chapter 2, Page 26
Summary
Rorschach walks through a rain-soaked cemetery to Edward Blake’s grave, where he silently pays his respects. His journal turns the burial into a montage of masked adventurers’ violent, humiliating deaths and moral failures, ending with Blake’s brutal assault on Sally Jupiter and a world seemingly rushing toward catastrophe.
Panels
A wide establishing panel gives Rorschach’s approach a solemn, cinematic duration; six smaller panels then fracture that calm into a catalogue of deaths, conflict, and degradation. The regular grid imposes order on morally chaotic material, while the cuts between unrelated times and places make Rorschach’s reflections feel associative rather than documentary. The following page intensifies this montage and converts it into Blake’s Pagliacci joke, so this page functions as the gathering pressure before that bleak punchline.
Environment
The cemetery’s orderly rows of white crosses resemble both military graves and marks on the “giant scoreboard” of Rorschach’s narration. That severe landscape gives way to enclosed, lurid interiors—machines, bedrooms, and meeting rooms—so that public commemoration is steadily invaded by the sordid private history concealed beneath heroic reputations.
Color
Cool gray-violets and sickly greens govern the cemetery, making Rorschach appear isolated within a drained, funereal world. The remembered scenes abruptly shift into saturated pinks, reds, and oranges; history is not softened by nostalgia but rendered feverish and violent, culminating in the flame-colored final panel that visually propels the reader toward the next page.
Symbols
Blake’s grave and roses make remembrance the page’s governing motif, but the flowers cannot sentimentalize him: the montage repeatedly returns to violence as the common fate of masked lives. The smiley badge on Blake’s chest in panel 6 is especially charged; attached to an act of sexual violence, its manufactured cheer becomes an emblem of the gulf between public image and private reality.
Themes
Rorschach interprets Blake through their shared belief that life is conflict without shelter, yet the images complicate that affinity by confronting us with Blake’s cruelty. His claim that consequences are “unimportant” exposes the danger in his fatalism: moral judgment survives, but compassion and accountability are being stripped away. The page therefore binds masculinity, violence, and heroic performance to a culture approaching apocalypse.
Graphic Novel Technique
The page creates meaning through the friction between continuous journal captions and discontinuous images. Rorschach seems to narrate one meditation at the grave, while the drawings open several historical moments at once, allowing readers to compare his severe philosophy with evidence he selectively absorbs into it. This layered counterpoint—voice-over, montage, and recurring visual motifs—is a particularly sophisticated use of comics’ ability to make past and present coexist on a single page.