Notes on this page
Chapter 9, Page 15
Summary
At Nelson Gardner’s mansion, the teenage Laurie leaves a gathering of costumed adventurers and encounters Edward Blake, the Comedian, outside. His apparently friendly attention becomes increasingly intimate until Sally Jupiter intervenes, abruptly changing the scene from awkward flirtation to confrontation.
Panels
Gibbons uses the regular nine-panel grid to move from compressed recollection into an increasingly prolonged encounter. The distant departures in panel 3 leave Laurie isolated; subsequent panels narrow toward faces, hands, smoke, and touch, slowing the reader at exactly the point danger becomes legible. Panel 9 introduces Sally from Laurie’s viewpoint, and the page turn converts her command into the fuller confrontation on the following page.
Environment
The mansion grounds place adolescent vulnerability inside the supposedly protective world of retired heroes: Dan departs in his owlship, Rorschach vanishes into the bushes, and Blake remains behind. Costumes, spacecraft, cigarettes, and suburban fencing make vigilantism look less like public spectacle than a compromised adult social world into which Laurie has been raised.
Color
Cool blues and greens govern the party and grounds, while the later panels shift toward pinks, violets, and black, intensifying the night’s uneasy intimacy. Laurie’s brown clothing remains visually consistent as framing closes around her; Blake’s dark costume and red hair repeatedly intrude against softer backgrounds, culminating in the stark foreground of his black glove beneath Sally’s accusing figure.
Symbols
The page is organized around looking: Laurie recalls staring at Dr. Manhattan, Blake scrutinizes her resemblance to Sally, and his attention becomes a form of possession. The cigarette and lighter turn that gaze into physical proximity; what begins as borrowed fire culminates in his gloved hand reaching toward her, making an ordinary social gesture feel predatory.
Themes
The page dismantles superhero nostalgia by revealing danger within the heroic fraternity itself. Laurie’s memory links romantic curiosity, parental secrecy, and masculine entitlement: Blake treats her resemblance to Sally as permission, while the reader understands that Sally’s furious intervention carries a history Laurie does not yet know. The scene therefore turns inherited identity into inherited trauma.
Graphic Novel Technique
Comics allows Laurie’s retrospective captions and the visible past to coexist without fully agreeing: her casual account gradually acquires a menace that the younger Laurie only partly recognizes. The grid makes that recognition spatial, moving from public group scenes to isolating close-ups, while the final panel suspends Sally’s command across the page turn. This controlled withholding is a particularly sophisticated use of sequential narration.