Notes on this page
Chapter 9, Page 01
Summary
In Daniel Dreiberg’s apartment, Dr. Manhattan abruptly asks Laurie to go with him; despite Dan’s alarm and the police gathering outside, she takes Jon’s hand. The page turns that decision into disappearance: Laurie and Jon are swallowed by blackness, leaving Dan’s final “Don’t…” suspended too late.
Panels
The page begins with three conventional upper panels—object, confrontation, contact—then abandons ordinary segmentation. In panel 4, broad black vertical bands progressively occlude Jon, Laurie, Dan, and the room, turning teleportation into a visual shutter; panel 5 completes the movement as near-total blackness. The following page reverses the device, opening those bands onto Mars, so the page turn itself performs the journey.
Environment
The ordinary apartment—doorway, wall clock, framed picture, ringing doorbell—makes Jon’s intervention feel almost indecently abrupt. Police hammering outside place Dan under immediate earthly pressure, while Jon’s awareness of them without looking reinforces how completely his powers exceed the domestic and legal world around him.
Color
The perfume’s saturated purple and yellow gives way to the apartment’s pale green, Jon’s cool blue, and Laurie’s warm skin and clothing. As black consumes the lower half, color is stripped away along with place and certainty; the effect is less a naturalistic depiction of movement than a controlled figure-ground collapse, with human bodies reduced to narrow, vanishing fragments.
Symbols
The floating Nostalgia perfume bottle carries the chapter’s central irony: an emblem of packaged memory drifts through a star field just as Laurie is about to confront her own past. Its circular body also echoes the apartment clock, linking nostalgia to time; on the preceding cover, the same bottle establishes this image before the narrative gives it emotional meaning.
Themes
Laurie’s choice stages a conflict between human attachment and superhuman power: Dan pleads and worries, but Jon simply arrives, knows the police are outside, and removes her from the situation. Yet Laurie retains a crucial measure of agency by taking his hand. The title, “The Darkness of Mere Being,” frames the ensuing chapter as an inquiry into whether bare existence—cosmic, biological, or human—has meaning beyond accident and memory.
Graphic Novel Technique
Comics allows the black bars to be read simultaneously as physical obstruction, elapsed moments, and gutters invading the image. Because the reader can linger over each surviving sliver of Dan or Laurie, disappearance becomes spatial rather than merely instantaneous. The tiny speech fragment “Don’t…” remains visible inside an otherwise black field, an unusually severe use of negative space that makes Dan’s helplessness palpable before the page turn reveals Mars.