Notes on this page
Chapter 9, Page 02
Summary
Dr. Manhattan abruptly transports Laurie from the Rockefeller military facility to Mars. While he calmly presents the landscape and asks whether she likes it, Laurie begins coughing and choking in the airless environment, turning his grand gesture into an immediate demonstration of danger and estrangement.
Panels
Five panels reshape the nine-panel grid into broad horizontal tiers. Panel 1 stretches the transition across the page, its alternating strips allowing two spaces to coexist before Mars takes over; panel 2 then grants Manhattan a monumental central portrait, while the three smaller lower panels slow Laurie’s physical realization of where she is. The previous page’s black final panel creates a page-turn blackout, and the following page converts her interrupted breath into collapse.
Environment
The sterile institutional room visible at the opening gives way to an immense, uninhabited Martian plain beneath a star field. Laurie’s ordinary clothes and handbag look almost absurdly vulnerable there, emphasizing that Manhattan has carried a human body—and its mundane needs—into a setting suited only to himself.
Color
Black, violet, pink, and pale yellow establish Mars as spectacular but inhospitable, while Manhattan’s cool blue body remains visually stable across both Earth and Mars. Laurie’s warm flesh and yellow clothing stand out against the alien palette, marking her as the fragile biological presence in a world whose beauty is indifferent to her survival.
Symbols
The dominant motif is enclosure: vertical black bars initially fragment Manhattan and then reveal Mars between them, making teleportation resemble both a curtain opening and a prison gate. The barren planet externalizes Manhattan’s emotional condition; Laurie can enter his world only at mortal risk, while he remains serenely at home in it.
Themes
The page makes Manhattan’s power inseparable from his failure of responsibility. He can cross interplanetary distance effortlessly, yet momentarily forgets that Laurie must breathe; his mild question, “Do you like it?”, is therefore both innocent and horrifying. Cosmic power has not produced practical wisdom or empathy—it has made ordinary human limits difficult for him to remember.
Graphic Novel Technique
The opening transition exploits the fixed page in a way prose or a conventional cut cannot: Earth and Mars occupy the same panel simultaneously, separated by graphic bands that the reader scans as a gradual transformation. Laurie’s broken speech then makes reading time bodily; the shrinking utterances force pauses before the page turn, where the next page reveals the consequence Manhattan has failed to anticipate.