Watchmen: Chapter IX - page 21

PAGE 21

Panel 3:  Blake’s succinct remark here – “Only once.” – reinforces the understanding that he and Sally did have at least one intimate encounter long after his sexual assault of her.

Panel 4:  Here Moore deflects this suspicion with Laurie’s reading of Blake’s remark that he raped her mother “only once.”

And note that the scotch Laurie throws in Blake’s face splashes into his right eye – the same eye upon which his blood splattered onto the smiley face button in Chapter I – and a drop of the scotch falls onto that same eye on his smiley face button, accentuating this visual motif of the blood-spattered smiley face button that runs throughout the whole book.

Again we come to the end of the flashback scene with a broken vessel – in this instance, the broken vessel is Laurie, which splashes scotch instead of water this time – that transitions directly into

Panel 5: and the tumbling bottle of Nostalgia perfume.

Panel 7:  Laurie’s scattering of her mother’s scrapbook clippings – news stories about the original Silk Spectre – can be viewed as Laurie running away from her history, trying vainly to be rid of something that lives inside of us and can never be excised.