Notes on this page
Chapter 9, Page 22
Summary
On Mars, Dr. Manhattan teleports his immense clockwork palace to Argyre Planitia at Laurie’s request. Laurie declares their conversation finished and walks away, but then pauses to concede that Jon may be right about the “street full of corpses”; her retreat becomes the first small reopening of their argument.
Panels
The page radically enlarges the nine-panel grid: one huge establishing image occupies the upper two-thirds, followed by three equal panels that slow Laurie’s departure into distinct beats. Her apparent exit, hesitation, and backward question create a measured reversal; the following page then returns to a denser grid as their renewed exchange opens into contested memories.
Environment
The environment has been stripped of ordinary social life: Jon and Laurie occupy a fantastical, mechanically elaborate palace suspended amid Martian clouds. Its impossible scale turns their private dispute into something nearly cosmic, while Laurie’s handbag and ordinary clothes preserve the human world she is trying to defend against Jon’s abstraction.
Color
The upper panel is dominated by saturated yellows, oranges, and reds, making Mars feel less empty than operatic and volatile; Jon’s palace appears as a dark, intricate silhouette within luminous clouds. Below, cool blue Jon and warm yellow Laurie remain chromatically opposed against pink architecture, visually preserving their philosophical distance even as Laurie begins to reconsider.
Symbols
The palace’s circular body, radial machinery, and forest of needle-like spires suggest a gigantic clock or astronomical instrument—an emblem of Jon’s mechanistic view of existence. Yet the structure is partly hidden by turbulent clouds, a useful visual counterpoint: the order he perceives remains difficult for Laurie, and for the reader, to see whole.
Themes
Laurie’s admission marks a crucial shift from anger toward inquiry. Jon has treated human life as statistically insignificant, while Laurie insists upon emotional and moral particularity; here she grants that his evidence may be right without accepting his conclusions. The page therefore turns persuasion into an ethical struggle between detached pattern and lived experience.
Graphic Novel Technique
Comics makes the change of scale instantaneous: the reader moves from a monumental tableau to three intimate conversational fragments without camera movement or explanatory narration. The gutters let Laurie’s certainty weaken in stages, and the page turn rewards her hesitation with the following page’s renewed argument—a sophisticated use of spatial layout to render thought as visible rhythm.