Notes on this page
Chapter 4, Page 18
Summary
In May 1966, Dr. Manhattan patrols New York with the young Laurie Juspeczyk, whose curiosity and affection sharpen his memory of Janey Slater’s jealousy. The page moves between Laurie naming him “Jon,” Janey’s furious confrontation, and an earlier domestic memory, turning a new romance into evidence of an old relationship’s collapse.
Panels
Six panels expand and contract the nine-panel grid into paired blocks, with Jon and Laurie’s courtship alternating against Janey’s accusation and departure. The central kiss repeats the previous page’s closing embrace, but the page immediately subjects that image to Janey’s angry counterpoint; the final wide panel then prepares the following page’s chronological leap into 1969.
Environment
The glittering Manhattan skyline frames Jon and Laurie like figures in a romantic urban fantasy, but the interiors are spare and emotionally hostile. At the bottom, Janey’s packing, the open suitcase, and the photograph lying in the sand translate a grand superhero love triangle into the ordinary debris of separation.
Color
Cool Manhattan blue binds Jon across every time period, while Laurie’s yellow makes her glow against the black-and-acid-yellow city. Janey’s scenes shift toward bruised purples and muted domestic greens, so color distinguishes not simply dates but emotional climates: exhilaration with Laurie, resentment and exhaustion with Janey.
Symbols
The photograph is the page’s crucial object: in Jon’s nonlinear consciousness, it can be simultaneously a keepsake Janey once handled and an abandoned image at his feet on Mars. Glass also links memory, fragility, and mediation; personal history reaches Jon as something framed, held, and finally dropped.
Themes
The page makes Jon’s detachment inseparable from his power: he experiences Janey’s pain as another fixed event rather than a crisis demanding moral response. Her cruel remarks about aging also expose the unequal temporality of their relationship—his body remains perfect and ageless while hers becomes, in both their eyes, evidence of human vulnerability.
Graphic Novel Technique
Comics lets several years occupy one stable page, allowing the reader to see courtship, betrayal, memory, and aftermath at once—an approximation of Jon’s simultaneous perception of time. Captions supply dates, but repeated bodies, colors, and objects create the deeper continuity; the gutters become temporal jumps that Jon scarcely experiences as jumps at all.