Notes on this page
Chapter 4, Page 25
Summary
Dr. Manhattan moves through several moments at once: learning of Edward Blake’s murder, attending Blake’s funeral, embracing Laurie in 1966, watching her leave him, facing accusations on television, and returning to the Arizona bar. Exhausted by human entanglements, he takes Janey’s photograph and leaves Earth for Mars.
Panels
The page adapts the nine-panel grid into eight units, enlarging Laurie’s departure across two columns while otherwise maintaining a measured, clocklike rhythm. The sequence cuts among 1959, 1966, and 1985 without transitional explanation because Jon experiences them concurrently; captions such as “later,” “in the past,” and “now” make chronology sound almost arbitrary. The final three panels slow into a decisive progression: arrival, retrieval, absence. The page turn then answers “I’m gone” with the stark declaration “Gone to Mars.”
Environment
The settings flicker between government quarters, cemetery, television studio, and the ruined Arizona bar, but each is less a fully inhabited place than a fragment in Jon’s simultaneous consciousness. The studio audience converts private suffering into public spectacle, while the wrecked bar—strewn with broken bottles and abandoned objects—visually externalizes his severance from human society.
Color
Cool blues bind Jon’s body and caption boxes across every period, making him the stable visual constant while environments shift through turquoise, red-orange, sickly green, purple, and black. Laurie’s warm red clothing and the orange doorway intensify the emotional heat of her departure; by the last panel, those human colors have vanished into a black sky and barren ground, leaving only a tiny pink star as a destination.
Symbols
The broken photograph is the page’s governing object: a supposedly fixed image of happiness whose damaged frame exposes the fragility of memory. Jon’s blue hands successively hold Laurie’s face, fail to hold her as she walks away, and finally grasp the photograph; touch becomes a motif for his desire to preserve relationships despite knowing that every intimate moment is already passing or broken.
Themes
Jon’s claim to be “caught in the tangle” of human lives is ironic: his near-omniscience does not free him from attachment but makes every loss permanently present. The page turns determinism into emotional crisis—he acts as though departure is inevitable, yet carefully carries Janey’s photograph. His retreat is therefore both cosmic renunciation and recognizably human avoidance, sharpening the book’s question of whether knowledge diminishes responsibility.
Graphic Novel Technique
Comics can place mutually distant moments side by side on one visible field, allowing the reader to experience a faint analogue of Jon’s nonlinear perception: the eye may move sequentially, glance backward, or hold several panels in awareness together. The captions stitch images into a grammatical flow even as the pictures fracture chronology. This tension between orderly grid and disordered time is an unusually sophisticated use of mainstream superhero-comics form, culminating in a page-turn transition that converts an emotional exit into a planetary one.