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Panel 1: The caption boxes are from President Nixon
and his cabinet members and other advisors discussing the ramifications of Russia’s invasion into Afghanistan – a
reality that occurred years earlier in our own world.
Nixon’s
remark that “if he (i.e. Dr. Manhattan) wanted to live on a red planet (Mars),
he should have stayed home” refers to Russia’s military mobilization. Russians, or more accurately Soviets, were
called “Reds” as a result of the Bolshevik revolution in the early twentieth
century. In 1918, Russia was
going through a civil war, and the Bolshevik army was named the Red Army, named
for the spilled blood of the working class that was fighting for
Communism. When the Bolsheviks were
victorious and eventually gained political control of Russia, the
term Reds – for their Red Army – was attached as a derogatory label that lasted
through the Cold War.
Panel 3: The statement, “I’m talking total
devastation” is another example of the juxtaposition between words and images
that Moore & Gibbons pioneered with this comic. It not only refers to the scenario of a
Russian nuclear strike, but to the scene in this panel with Dr. Manhattan
walking across Mars’s devastated landscape, a huge cloud of dust following him
along its surface.
Panel 5: More juxtaposition as one of Nixon’s advisors
says in the caption box “. . . any moment now we’ll be able to give you an
overview” just as Dr. Manhattan is coming over a rise to find the place on Mars
where he can sit and think.
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