Notes on this page
Chapter 9, Page 20
Summary
On Mars, Laurie recounts a 1973 banquet honoring Edward Blake, moving from a hazy memory of heavy drinking to a sharply remembered confrontation. Blake needles her about her name and mother, then his insinuations provoke Laurie’s explosive accusation that he tried to rape Sally Jupiter—a charge whose answer is deferred to the next page.
Panels
The strict nine-panel grid begins with three caption-heavy fragments of uncertain recollection, then steadily replaces haze with direct dialogue, closer framing, and escalating confrontation. Laurie moves from background observer to central participant, while Blake grows from a reflected figure to an invasive close presence; the final close-up makes her accusation the page’s emotional climax. The page turn withholds Blake’s startling reply, “Only once,” allowing the next page to reverse Laurie’s moral certainty before Jon reframes her existence as a “thermodynamic miracle.”
Environment
The patriotic bunting, tuxedos, cocktails, press chatter, and references to Nixon and Ford place the memory inside the respectable political establishment of Watchmen’s alternate America. Against this ceremonial backdrop, casual antisemitism, conspiracy talk, marijuana jokes, and sexual aggression expose the ugliness beneath the evening’s polished public surface.
Color
Warm oranges, yellows, and patriotic reds make the banquet appear socially inviting, but Higgins repeatedly sets these colors against black formalwear and Blake’s dark blue suit. The cheerful palette therefore becomes bitterly ironic: as the framing tightens and the dialogue turns predatory, the festive color field remains in place, suggesting how violence and humiliation can hide inside respectable ceremony.
Symbols
Panel 1 frames the banquet through Laurie’s tilted drinking glass: memory is literally refracted through alcohol, giving visible form to her repeated metaphor of being “lost in the fog.” Blake’s smiley badge then appears amid his bullying performance, turning the familiar emblem into a miniature mask of geniality pinned over cruelty; Laurie’s accusation tears through that public face.
Themes
The page turns a public tribute into an inquiry about private history, activating Watchmen’s persistent conflict between reputation and reality. Laurie initially interprets Blake through the inherited story of her mother’s assault, yet his contemptuous familiarity hints that her family history is more complicated than she knows; the following page reveals that her own identity arose from the morally bewildering later relationship between Sally and Blake.
Graphic Novel Technique
Comics lets the page present memory as both narration and visible reconstruction: Laurie’s captions admit uncertainty while the images acquire increasing immediacy, so readers feel recollection sharpening rather than receiving a neutral flashback. The grid controls that transformation with unusual precision, and the gutter after the final panel becomes an active pause: the reader must cross the page turn to discover the answer that destabilizes everything Laurie has just asserted.