Notes on this page
Chapter 9, Page 10
Summary
On Mars, Laurie asks for water while pressing Jon to care about humanity’s possible extinction; he provides the drink but remains emotionally unmoved by generations of suffering and struggle. Her phrase about effort achieving nothing triggers a memory of a workout and begins the chapter’s movement into her past.
Panels
The page bends the nine-panel grid into an asymmetrical structure: a tall establishing panel anchors the entire left side while six smaller panels advance conversation and memory on the right. Jon’s palace appears remote and nearly lost in space, whereas Laurie is progressively enclosed by tighter framings; the final close-up of the dumbbell then creates a match cut across the page turn to Laurie exercising on the following page.
Environment
The immense clockwork palace suspended above the Martian desert makes ordinary hospitality strangely difficult: Laurie is nauseated, thirsty, and physically fragile inside an environment Jon has shaped for himself. The contrast reveals that even his magnificent architecture has little accommodation for human needs—a visual measure of the gulf between creator and guest.
Color
Black space and the palace’s yellow-orange machinery dominate the left panel, making the structure appear brilliant yet minuscule against the void. On the right, Jon’s cool blue body remains visually separate from Laurie and the warm vessels around her, while the sudden mauve ground behind the pouring water isolates her startled face and marks the drink as an uncanny act rather than a comforting gesture.
Symbols
Containers and circular forms organize the page: bottle, cup, palace mechanisms, and finally the dumbbell’s round weights. The last panel transforms Laurie’s question about what humanity’s effort has achieved into the image of repetitive exercise, linking cosmic futility to bodily labor while using the dumbbell as a concrete handle on memory.
Themes
The page stages an argument between human valuation and Jon’s cosmic detachment. Laurie treats accumulated pain, struggle, and threatened death as morally urgent; Jon answers her practical request instantly but cannot supply empathy, exposing the difference between possessing power and accepting responsibility. Ironically, his indifference helps prompt the autobiographical reckoning that will eventually change his judgment.
Graphic Novel Technique
Comics allows Laurie’s words to occupy two times at once: her question remains attached to the Martian conversation as the image shifts to a remembered dumbbell, and the reader may pause over that hinge before turning the page. The transition is not announced by exposition; meaning arises through visual resemblance and the gutter, a particularly sophisticated use of associative montage within a mainstream superhero narrative.