Notes on this page
Chapter 3, Page 05
Summary
In their government-provided apartment, Laurie confronts Jon after his duplicated bodies frighten her during sex; his detached attempts to continue dressing and working only intensify the quarrel. Laurie smashes a bottle, announces that she is leaving, and departs while Jon remains divided into several impassive selves.
Panels
The rigid nine-panel grid gives the breakup an inexorable, measured rhythm. Repeated medium shots of Laurie crossing the room contrast with Jon’s nearly fixed figures, while the smashed bottle in panel 6 provides the page’s sharpest visual and emotional rupture; the following panels then slow into departure and aftermath. Coming after the previous page’s large, startling revelation of Jon’s duplicates, this regular grid converts shock into sustained estrangement.
Environment
The sterile, rectilinear apartment resembles institutional housing more than a shared home, reinforcing Laurie’s complaint that Jon’s work and public function have displaced intimacy. Its ordinary domestic objects—cosmetics, clothing, bottles—become painfully human counterweights to his limitless powers.
Color
Jon’s pale blue bodies recur against lavender walls and deep black doorways, giving him an icy consistency while Laurie’s saturated red robe makes her the page’s emotional center. The purple splash of the broken bottle briefly spreads disorder across Jon’s blue form and the tabletop, visually registering an anger that his expression does not acknowledge.
Symbols
Jon’s multiplication is the page’s governing motif: several identical bodies occupy one room, turning his superhuman control into an image of emotional fragmentation. His calm duplicates mirror one another while Laurie moves among them in red, making visible the central irony that omnipresence is not the same as attentiveness.
Themes
The page turns extraordinary power into a failure of ordinary responsibility. Jon can divide himself, prepare for an interview, conduct research, and attempt intimacy simultaneously, yet he cannot understand why Laurie experiences that efficiency as betrayal; Moore makes his godlike perspective inseparable from a growing incapacity for human reciprocity. Laurie’s departure shifts power back toward the supposedly less powerful partner through the simple exercise of choice.
Graphic Novel Technique
Comics can place Jon’s simultaneous selves together without privileging one as the “real” present, allowing the reader to apprehend his nonlinear multiplicity and Laurie’s confusion in a single glance. Repeated compositions with altered positions make tiny changes—her retreat, the broken glass, the widening distance—carry the drama. In the final panel, interview testimony beginning in a caption-like box bridges into the following page, linking this private rupture to a broader public history of Jon’s detachment.