(Top two panels of page 80)

This particular two-panel progression highlights one of the most unique elements of the pivotal WEM (or Water! Electricity! Meat!) Protests that occur in the graphic novel Citizen Rex by Gilbert and Mario Hernandez. While on first glance the protests seem to serve primarily as a stage for major plot points (the injury to Ms. Skink, the frightening return of Rex to public view) but as the reader attempts to unravel the true meaning (if there is one) to the novel, a few major elements of the event come to view. One of those is captured in these two panels, and the representation of the robots within.

Though time progresses between the two panels, that isn’t their primary focus, and indeed the expansive way they are laid out on the page, and the space behind the foreground figures, gives a certain stillness to both images, as though stopped in a moment before violent action (as it turns out, they are). The exchange is, as Scott McCloud calls it in Understanding Comics, a “Subject to Subject” transition: we are less interested in the progress of action, witnessing a moment or capturing a setting, than we are in observing two characters (or in this case, a character and the group to whom he’s speaking). Rex, blackened and terrifying, but still essentially humanoid and of godlike proportions, with a dramatically clenched first incites his robotic brethren to “cry out,” to, as the cliché goes, “throw off their shackles and revolt.” This image of Rex is at the top of the page, stacked (significantly) on the crowd of robots, the rabble gathered at the protest.

If the robots reacted passionately, if the dialogue boxes in the lower panel were filled with complaints about their mistreatment at the hands of humans and how the machines were not going to take it anymore, the sequence would be in keeping with countless other works. The reader anticipates, skipping from speech bubble to speech bubble, some sort of anger. This isn’t simply an expectation built from science fiction works, but rather the execution of the two panels taps into a deeper-set convention iconic to literature from subjugated minorities the world over. We have Rex, the charismatic leader, the best and most demonized of his group, and those he persuades to join the fight. But the Hernandez brothers, perhaps surprisingly (to those familiar more with their Chicano roots than their work) have other plans. Rather than screaming about the behavior of their humans, the robots have no interest in rising against their owners. Indeed their complaints are either about a lack of instruction, the absence of their “master,” or mundane operational issues – “My eye’s busted.” While this catches the reader off-guard, it is, indeed, in keeping with the theme of the protest: “Humans are humans, robots are robots.” The Robots, who are dehumanized structures, with strangely shaped geometric heads and bodies, do not desire to be independent, while the perhaps more-human-than-human Rex preaches to them a message they have no interest in.

Questions:

“Why?”

Who, if anyone, is the story’s true antagonist?

Does she or doesn't she?

What hair colors has Arlene had recently? What is noteworthy about these hair colors? What implications does this have in regards to Arlene’s (and subsequently her daughter’s) perception of beauty, in relation to their race?

What is the nickname of the daughter in “Miss Clairol”? What is the significance of the girl being named this to the story? What commentary about lower-class Mexican-American households, and girls from such, might Viramontes be making with this choice of name?