Notes on this page
Chapter 9, Page 21
Summary
At the Gila Flats banquet, Laurie confronts Edward Blake over his assault of Sally Jupiter; Blake’s chilling “Only once” is followed by Sally throwing her drink in his face. The scene then returns to Mars, where Laurie scatters her mother’s clippings and angrily dismisses human lives as meaningless while Jon begins to challenge her conclusion.
Panels
The strict nine-panel grid turns revelation into controlled escalation: accusation, Laurie’s horrified close-up, then Blake’s almost grotesque close-up and brutal reply. Panel 5 occupies the exact center as a match-cut between times and worlds; afterward, falling clippings carry motion through the lower row. The following page’s enormous Martian vista releases the pressure of this dense grid, making the page-turn feel like sudden spatial expansion.
Environment
American flags and formal evening clothes make the banquet a theater of patriotic respectability, sharply at odds with the sexual violence being discussed. On Mars, Sally’s clippings—public fragments of the Silk Spectre’s celebrity—blow through Jon’s fantastic pink architecture, turning a carefully preserved heroic image into literal debris.
Color
The banquet’s sharp yellows and magentas give the remembered confrontation an almost theatrical intensity, while Blake’s dark tuxedo and heavy facial lines make him loom within it. The black field of panel 5 interrupts that palette before the present settles into Martian pinks and reds, with Jon’s cool blue body visually separating his abstract calm from Laurie’s heated anger.
Symbols
The Comedian’s yellow smiley badge remains visible beneath the tuxedo and social charm, binding the familiar emblem of manufactured cheer to Blake’s cruelty. Panel 5 suspends the thrown glass and its liquid against blackness like an object in space: a mundane act of anger becomes the visual hinge between Earthly memory and Mars, while its circular form faintly echoes the badge.
Themes
The page sets public image against private reality: the celebrated Comedian answers an accusation of rape with a technical minimization, while Sally’s heroic memorabilia cannot contain the painful life behind it. Laurie then generalizes from these “grubby little human encounters” toward nihilism; Jon’s response begins the chapter’s decisive argument that moral disorder and human contingency need not make existence worthless.
Graphic Novel Technique
Comics allows the banquet, the thrown drink, the void, and Mars to coexist on one visible page, so the reader can perceive memory as an arrangement rather than a seamless flashback. Captions cross panel boundaries while images change time and location, and the central match-cut converts emotional association into spatial continuity—a particularly sophisticated use of the nine-panel form in mainstream superhero comics of the period.