Notes on this page
Chapter 4, Page 17
Summary
Jon Osterman’s nonlinear recollection moves from 1964, when the Pentagon requires him to adopt the full Dr. Manhattan costume, to the Crimebusters meeting of 1966, where he notices the young Laurie Juspeczyk. Their first attraction is juxtaposed with Janey Slater’s jealousy, aging, and eventual departure, while the page ends with Jon alone on Mars in 1985.
Panels
The page uses an eight-panel variation on the nine-panel grid, opening with a double-width overhead view whose crowded composition contrasts with increasingly intimate close-ups. Time advances and doubles back—1964, 1966, 1985, then 1966 again—without dissolves or conventional flashback markers; captions and repeated figures provide orientation. The final long shot abruptly expands the scale, transforming domestic stasis into Jon literally “standing still” on Mars.
Environment
The Crimebusters gathering turns Captain Metropolis’s map-filled headquarters into a stage crowded with brightly costumed identities, suggesting organized heroism as publicity and performance. The ordinary street outside, where Janey confronts Jon beneath buildings and parked cars, strips that spectacle away; Mars then removes the human environment altogether, reducing Jon’s complicated social history to a solitary figure in an indifferent landscape.
Color
The busy Crimebusters scenes mix cool greens and Jon’s blue with theatrical reds, yellows, and purples, making the room resemble a display of competing costumes. The Laurie panels concentrate warm yellow around her against Jon’s cool body, visually isolating their attraction. In the last panel, black space nearly consumes the page’s palette, leaving the pink Martian ground and tiny blue figure exposed and remote.
Symbols
Masks and disguises dominate the page even when Jon himself is physically unmasked. The Pentagon turns his costume into an official identity, the Crimebusters perform heroic personas around a table, and Jon describes the meeting as a room of “people wearing disguises.” Laurie’s intimate touch and kiss penetrate that public performance, yet they also begin another concealed life: the affair that Janey already suspects.
Themes
Jon narrates betrayal with the same detached tense he uses for government policy, revealing the moral cost of experiencing time as something already completed. Janey’s aging is, to him, an observable process; to Janey it is abandonment, humiliation, and replacement. The page therefore tests whether foreknowledge excuses conduct: Jon’s passivity looks less like fate than a failure to accept responsibility for choices he regards as inevitable.
Graphic Novel Technique
Comics can place several eras before the reader at once, allowing the eye to compare cause, consequence, and recollection spatially rather than receiving them in strict succession. Here a hand around Laurie’s face in 1985 sits beside their argument in 1966, while Janey’s departure leads directly to timeless Mars. That simultaneity formally approximates Jon’s consciousness while preserving the painful chronology experienced by everyone else.