Notes on this page
Chapter 9, Page 14
Summary
On Mars, Laurie challenges Jon’s claim that life is merely a narrow viewpoint, while he answers with the planet’s geology and insists that Mars itself “chose” lifelessness. Her irritation turns inward: she begins recounting how her mother shaped her career and recalls the Crimebusters meeting, using an old comic-book cover to open the memory that continues on the next page.
Panels
A vast opening panel occupies two-thirds of the page, slowing the argument into contemplation and making Laurie and Jon almost disappear within the landscape. The three equal panels below restore the book’s underlying nine-panel discipline and progressively narrow attention: Laurie at the window, the structure from overhead, then the comic in close-up. The preceding page names the “jumbled box canyons,” so the page turn delivers them at monumental scale; the final close-up then prepares another transition, into the memory scenes on the following page.
Environment
The Martian landscape is not passive scenery but Jon’s exhibit: immense eroded canyons, dried riverbeds, and harsh rock formations dwarf the airborne glass structure. Against that sublime scale, the battered “Black Unrest” comic in Laurie’s hand introduces a tawdrier human environment of publicity, entertainment, and manufactured heroic identity.
Color
John Higgins floods the large panel with incandescent yellows and oranges, but anchors it with heavy black and violet foreground rocks. The contrast gives Mars both radiance and menace: Jon’s lifeless world is visually exuberant, complicating his dismissal of life as uniquely meaningful. In the bottom tier, Laurie’s yellow clothing and the pink comic cover preserve that heat while redirecting attention from planetary history toward her personal past.
Symbols
The page repeatedly opposes geological formation to personal formation. Jon describes subterranean forces shaping “chaotic terrain,” while Laurie immediately says her mother “chipped” her into the shape she wanted; the circular airborne structure, seen from above in panel 3, becomes a fragile human pattern suspended over immense, indifferent matter. Yet Jon’s claim that Mars “chose” lifelessness quietly makes the supposedly scientific landscape speak the language of fate and agency.
Themes
Jon’s reasoning contains a revealing contradiction: he treats terrestrial life as accidental yet speaks of Mars as though it exercised choice. Laurie answers not with abstract philosophy but autobiography, shifting the chapter’s question from whether life matters to how a life is made by other people. Her mother’s pressure suggests constrained agency, while the “Black Unrest” artifact exposes superhero identity as something mediated through genre, publicity, and retrospective storytelling.
Graphic Novel Technique
The page makes scale itself argumentative. Comics can hold the enormous Martian panorama and the tiny comic book on one page, allowing the reader to compare planetary “history” with mass-produced personal history at a glance. Laurie’s spoken recollection begins before the flashback images arrive, and the embedded comic acts as a visual hinge: an object in the present becomes the threshold to the past, a particularly sophisticated use of page-turn pacing and nested media.