Notes on this page
Chapter 9, Page 23
Summary
On Mars, Laurie challenges Jon’s claim that human existence lacks meaning. As their argument intensifies, fragments of her childhood memories interrupt the conversation and converge on a devastating recognition: Edward Blake, the Comedian, was her father—a knowledge she immediately begins to resist on the following page.
Panels
Gibbons restores the nine-panel grid but uses it as an engine of psychological montage. Present-time panels alternate with memory fragments until the two streams begin to contaminate one another; captions repeat and break apart across separate images, while the central palace panel visually rhymes with the castle inside the snow globe. The page ends not with orderly explanation but with Laurie’s refusal, preparing the following page’s violent shattering of the toy.
Environment
The page alternates Jon’s crystalline Martian palace with enclosed domestic memories: a doorway, a childhood toy, and a dim room where Laurie once overheard Blake speaking with Sally. Mars initially seems remote from ordinary life, yet these modest interiors become the true alien territory, exposing a family history Laurie has never understood.
Color
The Martian present is dominated by pink architecture, Laurie’s yellow clothing, and Jon’s cool blue body, while the memories shift into sickly greens, violets, and harsh orange-black shadows. Panel 8 abruptly isolates Blake’s flesh tones against bright yellow, making his face—and the tiny smiley at the edge—the visual answer toward which the page has been moving.
Symbols
The snow globe is the governing motif: a miniature castle sealed inside a transparent world, echoing Jon’s palace and his desire to view existence as a complete, intelligible pattern. Blake’s close-up in panel 8, accompanied by the yellow smiley badge, turns the novel’s central emblem into a hereditary mark—Laurie’s buried connection to the murder that began the story.
Themes
Laurie accuses Jon of excluding emotion from his cosmic perspective, yet the page shows emotion performing its own kind of pattern recognition. Repeated phrases once dismissed as awkward adult conversation suddenly disclose Sally’s history and Laurie’s parentage. The irony is sharp: Jon urges her to perceive a larger design, but that design reveals itself through trauma rather than detached reason.
Graphic Novel Technique
Comics allows past and present to occupy the same page as simultaneously visible evidence: the reader can scan backward, compare repeated words, and assemble the revelation before Laurie can accept it. Caption fragments migrate between panels like involuntary memories, and visual rhymes replace conventional exposition. This controlled collision of dialogue, recollection, and page geometry is unusually sophisticated for mainstream superhero comics of the period.