Notes on this page
Chapter 9, Page 19
Summary
Jon and Laurie continue their argument aboard his airborne Martian palace, with Jon describing Valles Marineris as an image of emotional estrangement. When Laurie admits that she feels lost and remembers a humiliating 1973 banquet, the page shifts from the vast Martian landscape into her memory, beginning a flashback centered on Edward Blake.
Panels
One immense establishing panel occupies roughly two-thirds of the page, making the reader linger over distances that dwarf both characters and speech. Three narrow panels below accelerate the exchange: medium views of Laurie and Jon lead to a sudden cut into the banquet. That final panel functions as a page-turn invitation, with Laurie’s caption carrying us directly into the fully developed flashback on the following page.
Environment
Mars is rendered less as empty ground than as an ocean of fog pierced by isolated mesas, while Jon’s intricate palace appears almost absurdly small within it. The banquet glimpsed in panel 4 replaces geological emptiness with affluent social ritual—formal clothes, flowers, drinks, and patriotic décor—yet Laurie’s isolation persists in both environments.
Color
The dominant whites, pale pinks, and cool lavenders make Mars look strangely misted and insubstantial, while saturated orange rock anchors the foreground. Below, Laurie’s yellow costume briefly concentrates attention before the banquet introduces darker clothing, patterned décor, and warmer flesh tones; the palette thus helps move from sublime distance toward the crowded discomfort of memory.
Symbols
The fog and canyon translate psychological confusion into landscape: Laurie’s “hopelessly lost” recollection answers Jon’s question about whether the human heart contains equally abysmal chasms. Jon’s palace, suspended as a tiny artificial order above that void, extends the chapter’s recurring tension between his desire for perfect structure and the disorder of human feeling.
Themes
Jon speaks in cosmic measurements, but the page quietly turns his argument back toward Laurie’s lived pain: a canyon thousands of miles long becomes a metaphor for shame, loneliness, and damaged family history. The irony is that Jon recognizes emotional depth most readily when it resembles geography. Laurie’s memory will also complicate the identities of hero, victim, and aggressor surrounding Edward Blake.
Graphic Novel Technique
The page makes metaphor spatial and sequential. Readers see Jon’s “chasms” while Laurie’s dialogue converts them into emotional experience, then the gutter between panels 3 and 4 carries us across planets and years without explanatory machinery. The tiny simultaneous figures in the large panel and the close human framing below create a scale contrast that prose could describe, but comics lets the eye experience at once.