Notes on this page
Chapter 2, Page 27
Summary
At Edward Blake’s funeral, Rorschach’s internal eulogy becomes a montage of the Comedian’s violent life: civil disorder, Vietnam, private collapse, and finally his murder. As Rorschach tells the Pagliacci joke, Blake shifts from the man who recognizes society’s cruelty to the lonely clown who cannot survive that recognition.
Panels
The page uses six regular panels over one triple-width panel, preserving the architecture of the nine-panel grid while giving the murder a climactic horizontal expanse. Rapid cuts among different periods make Blake’s life feel less like continuous biography than accumulated evidence; the final widened panel then stretches the instant of his fall. The following page slows that descent into three more vertical images before an abrupt field of red.
Environment
The settings condense Blake’s alternate-American history into emblematic stages: burning urban streets, a Vietnam battlefield, and a dark bedroom where he weeps before Moloch. Public history and private misery occupy the same grid, suggesting that the swaggering government operative produced by this violent society is also one of its casualties.
Color
John Higgins compresses the montage into hot reds, oranges, pinks, and heavy black, making riots, war, tears, and murder appear to belong to one continuous emotional climate. The nearly restricted palette removes nostalgic distance from the flashbacks: Blake’s past is not safely over but visually burns into his death, with the yellow badge remaining a bitter point of emphasis.
Symbols
The smiley badge repeatedly punctuates Blake’s battered body, its cheerful design made grotesque by blood and violence. More broadly, the clown motif joins the badge to Blake’s identity: both are smiling surfaces imposed on despair. The concluding fall also returns to the book’s foundational image, revealing the “joke” as a performance that ends in death.
Themes
Rorschach admires Blake because he believes the Comedian saw society’s underlying brutality without comforting illusions. Yet the Pagliacci joke exposes the cost of that supposed clarity: Blake’s public cynicism is itself a mask, and his visit to Moloch reveals terror and helplessness beneath it. The page therefore complicates Rorschach’s heroic reading even as he voices it.
Graphic Novel Technique
Caption and image form an ironic counterpoint: the joke proceeds in orderly verbal steps while the pictures leap across decades of violence, allowing readers to assemble Blake’s psychological biography in the gutters. The punch line, “I am Pagliacci,” coincides not with a clown’s face but with Blake crashing through glass—a sophisticated use of montage in which verbal revelation, remembered history, and physical destruction become simultaneous.