Notes on this page
Chapter 9, Page 03
Summary
Jon teleports Laurie from Earth to the Martian surface, where her handbag and its contents scatter as she collapses in the airless environment. She clings to him in terror until he realizes his mistake and restores her air, converting what should be a sublime arrival into an immediate demonstration of his estrangement from ordinary human needs.
Panels
Gibbons uses the regular nine-panel grid to stretch a single error into nine measured beats. Panels 1–4 fragment the arrival through displaced objects and Laurie’s tumbling body; panels 5–7 delay explanation as she crawls toward Jon, and only in panels 8–9 does his calm apology identify the danger. The page therefore makes Jon’s delayed comprehension feel almost procedural, while Laurie experiences each panel as another instant of panic. The preceding page’s broad Martian vistas make this abrupt fragmentation more violent, and the following page pays it off with a full-width architectural reveal.
Environment
Mars is presented less as romantic frontier than as a lethal vacuum: black sky, violet ground, and drifting personal debris surround Laurie as she suffocates. The prominent perfume atomizer and spilled handbag transplant fragile consumer life into an environment indifferent to it, while the following page’s immense glass palace reveals that even this apparently empty wilderness has already been reshaped by Jon’s private imagination.
Color
Laurie’s warm ochres and dark red hair clash with Jon’s cool blue and the violet-pink Martian dust, making her seem visually foreign and physically vulnerable. Pink clouds initially resemble theatrical smoke, but here they mark violent displacement and suffocation; in the final panel, the white halo around Laurie sharply separates her from the black sky, visually announcing the return of a life-sustaining boundary.
Symbols
The page repeatedly contrasts Jon’s stable, upright body with Laurie’s falling, crawling, and grasping poses. That opposition gives physical form to their unequal relationship: he has become nearly at home in the cosmos, while she remains bound to breath, gravity, possessions, and fear; her hands clutching his leg make dependence painfully literal rather than romantically abstract.
Themes
Jon’s lapse exposes the central conflict of the chapter: immense power has not enlarged his sympathy but weakened his ability to imagine another person’s limitations. His statement that such things “slip” his mind is darkly comic, yet the comedy carries moral weight—Laurie’s life depends on whether an almost omnipotent being remembers the smallest requirements of being human. The scene thus turns emotional alienation into a material hazard.
Graphic Novel Technique
The page makes the reader infer catastrophe before dialogue explains it: scattered objects, Laurie’s uncontrolled descent, and her increasingly desperate contact with Jon supply the missing causal links across the gutters. Because all nine moments remain visible at once, Jon’s impassive posture can be compared continuously with Laurie’s bodily distress—an especially sophisticated use of comics’ spatialized time, making emotional distance measurable as a repeated compositional fact.