Notes on this page
Chapter 10, Page 03
Summary
President Richard Nixon arrives at NORAD’s command complex and briefly exchanges domestic pleasantries before joining military advisers debating a possible first strike, East German tank movements, and the continuing DEFCON Two alert. The page ends not with decisive action but with Nixon and his officials sitting underground, waiting.
Panels
Five panels stretch the nine-panel grid into a rhythm of three broad tiers: a wide arrival, three compressed exchanges, and a wide concluding tableau. The middle row accelerates the debate through abrupt cuts among competing voices; the final panel then enlarges and slows time as the dialogue contracts to “sit” and “wait.” The following page’s cut to Dan and Rorschach working above ground sharpens the contrast between governmental paralysis and vigilante action.
Environment
The uniforms, USAF vehicles, armed security, DEFCON signage, command consoles, and wall-sized strategic map make the complex feel both technologically formidable and bureaucratically ordinary. Nixon’s continued presidency is the clearest evidence of the alternate history, while his casual discussion of Mrs. Nixon against this militarized setting makes nuclear crisis management disturbingly routine.
Color
Warm oranges and pinks unify the underground complex, but heavy black shadows repeatedly swallow figures and ceilings, making the nominal warmth feel airless rather than comforting. In the final panel, Nixon’s dark purple suit and the black briefcase press toward the foreground while the pale strategic map recedes behind them, visually prioritizing the human instruments of power over the abstract territories endangered by their decisions.
Symbols
The handcuffed briefcase dominates the final panel’s foreground, turning presidential authority into a blunt image of captivity: Nixon possesses nuclear power, yet is also physically tethered to its machinery and protocols. Behind it, the map’s descending arrows echo the language of a first strike, making the room itself seem organized around anticipated catastrophe.
Themes
The page presents political power as anxious stasis. Advisers speak in the language of probabilities, alarmism, and procedural readiness, yet no one can convert information into confident action; even Nixon’s impatience produces only another question. The irony is central to Watchmen’s critique of institutions: the people authorized to end civilization appear trapped between masculine displays of resolve and terror of their consequences.
Graphic Novel Technique
Comics allows the reader to hold the page’s two scales of crisis together: conversational fragments in separate panels accumulate above the final, frozen image of the nuclear command apparatus. The transition from “What do we do next?” to “we sit” and “we wait” becomes spatial as well as verbal—the eye descends into a large panel where time seems to stop. This is a particularly controlled use of page architecture for mainstream superhero comics of the period.