Page 31 CTZ-RX-1

On page 31 of Mario and Gilbert Hernandez’s “Citizen Rex”, the use of subject-to-subject transitions is relied on heavily to get the intent across to the reader. In the first panel of the page, Mr. Bloggo and Hazel are in a crowd outside that is riled by the news of Citizen Rex being in town. The characters are not speaking to each other, but seem to have contemplative expressions as they look at the scene in front of them. Faint figures of people can be seen in the background who are either arguing to each other or in distress. A sign that says “Rex” in big, bold, stylized letters hangs above the figures. Mr. Bloggo is narrating in this panel and describes how the town was “going crazy” over the news of CTZ-RX-1. He then tells the reader that he and Hazel were looking for some witnesses who claim to have seen Rex.

            The next four panels show characters of an interesting variety, all claiming to have seen the elusive Rex. The first character is a bum on the sidewalk. He’s hunched over, greasy, and his clothes are tattered. He claims that Rex took his shoes when he was asleep in an alley. The next panel is of a young, awkward looking woman in a stark room. Her hair is pitch black with no shine, long, and parted straight down the middle. She has a unibrow, is slightly cross eyed, and her teeth are oversized. She also seems to be wearing no clothes, as the panel cuts off at her clavicle, and no shirt is seen before the panel ends. This character claims that her grandmother saw Rex in a laundry room trying on “unda draws”. The last of the odd characters is an overweight white woman in the fourth panel of the page. She seems to be very rich due to the lavish accessories and furniture she has. The woman has heavy eyeliner, is smoking, and claims that her maid and chauffeur saw
Rex stealing from the groceries they had in their garage. The fourth panel is of a character previously introduced to the reader as Renata Skink’s daughter. Because we have seen this character before, and know her experience with Rex to be true, we can assume that Mr. Bloggo and Hazel take her lead.

            What is most interesting about these four panels is that their bordered in thick black lines, separating them from the previous panel, and all other panels present throughout the comic. This signifies that this sequence of events happens in a different time lapse than the rest of the panels. Because of this, the reader is instantly ordered to view this sequence of events as happening in a slightly different time frame than the rest of the comic.

The way the artist ordered these characters in panels directly next to each other helps the reader get a sense that Mr. Bloggo and Hazel weren’t taking the leads of the first three characters presented until they met Sigmund Skink, Renata Skink’s daughter. For this reason, this page is a hallmark example of how McCloud describes subject-to-subject transitions to work. 

If Citizen Rex is such a celebrity that anyone would lie just to say they’ve seen him, why do you think that people also want him to not be human and, in some cases, want to destroy him?