Notes on this page
Chapter 9, Page 24
Summary
On Mars, Laurie recoils from the realization that Edward Blake, the Comedian, was her father, while Dr. Manhattan watches her denial harden into anguish. She hurls a Veidt “Nostalgia” perfume bottle, and the act merges with her memory of breaking a childhood snow globe.
Panels
The page retains the three-column discipline of the nine-panel grid but merges the middle tier into one panoramic panel. The cramped top row fractures Laurie’s denial into close views and repeated scraps of speech; the wide middle panel then expands her cry across the Martian landscape. Three bottom panels slow the thrown bottle into an impossible suspended interval, making psychological time, not physics, govern the sequence. Its final impact prepares the silent, palace-sized destruction after the page turn.
Environment
The Martian glass palace strips the scene of ordinary social context, leaving Laurie’s family revelation exposed against empty space. Yet Veidt’s “Nostalgia” bottle has followed humanity even here: a commercial product becomes the physical vessel for memory, showing how this alternate America packages longing for the past as something beautiful, portable, and saleable.
Color
Black space isolates saturated pinks, purples, and yellows, making both the palace and the bottle look like delicate toys displayed against a void. Laurie’s yellow clothing visually migrates into the liquid bursting from the bottle, so the impact seems to externalize her emotion; Manhattan’s cool blue remains comparatively stable, emphasizing the gulf between her human shock and his composure.
Symbols
The central motif is the fragile world inside a sphere. Laurie remembers a snow globe as “a little glass bubble of somewhere else,” while the round perfume bottle and its miniature-looking contents repeat that form; breaking it converts nostalgia from refuge into wreckage. On the following page, Manhattan’s palace collapses around Laurie while his protective bubble survives, enlarging her private symbol into architecture.
Themes
The page turns Laurie’s parentage into a crisis of identity: the man she despises is not merely part of her history but part of her. “Nostalgia” therefore becomes bitterly ironic. The past is neither a sentimental refuge nor a coherent design; it is a sealed construction whose contents become visible only when violence breaks it open. Her mother’s evasions and Blake’s assault now occupy the same unbearable family history.
Graphic Novel Technique
Comics lets the bottle fall through several kinds of time at once: present action, childhood recollection, repeated dialogue, and visual metaphor coexist on the page. The reader can look backward from the shattering image to the intact sphere, effectively reconstructing memory as Laurie does. This coordination of captions, repeated forms, and page-turn escalation is an unusually sophisticated use of mainstream superhero-comics grammar: an emotional realization becomes both montage and material event.