Notes on this page
Chapter 2, Page 28
Summary
The Comedian’s fatal fall continues from the previous page, ending in a flat red “Curtains” panel before the scene shifts to Edward Morgan Blake’s grave. Rorschach places a rose among the flowers, pauses over the dead man whose history he has been reconstructing, and walks alone from the cemetery.
Panels
The page begins with three vertical panels that extend the fall from the previous page: long shot, grotesque close-up, then an image emptied into red. That abrupt “Curtains” panel functions as both impact and theatrical blackout. The next three panels repeat the triptych at the grave, moving from flowers to Rorschach’s hand to the masked mourner; the wide final panel then releases him into the cemetery’s open space, slowing the chapter into an elegiac exit.
Environment
The cemetery turns Blake’s public identity into stark material facts: “Edward Morgan Blake, 1924–1985,” a crowded bed of roses, bare monuments, and a distant city skyline. Windblown autumn leaves link the graveyard to a world moving onward, while Rorschach’s fedora and trench coat make him resemble both mourner and private investigator.
Color
Saturated reds dominate the fall, culminating in the nearly featureless crimson third panel, then reappear as roses at Blake’s grave. Higgins thus carries violence across the temporal and spatial cut while changing its emotional register: the same red that signifies bodily destruction becomes ceremonial mourning, set against the cemetery’s subdued gray-violets, browns, and sickly greens.
Symbols
Circular forms quietly bind death to approaching catastrophe: the moon beside Blake’s fall, the glimpse of his smiley badge, and the clock beneath the closing quotation. The sequence converts the badge’s familiar circle into another countdown image, while the roses join beauty, blood-red color, and funeral ritual without reducing Blake’s violent life to a simple moral judgment.
Themes
“Curtains” frames Blake’s death as the end of a performance, apt for a man whose identity as the Comedian turned cruelty into a role and history into a joke. The Elvis Costello quotation about “absent friends” and “comedians” adds mournful irony: Rorschach rejects Blake’s morality yet treats his death as meaningful, revealing the uneasy fraternity beneath masked heroism.
Graphic Novel Technique
Comics allows the page to make Blake fall and be memorialized within one designed field: the reader can see the red terminal panel above the red roses and grasp the match before finishing the sequence. The inset quotation and clock behave like a closing title card, while the page’s controlled deviations from the nine-panel grid turn montage, epitaph, and chapter cadence into a single visual composition.