Iron Circus Comics sent us an early look at Radium Girls, a tale of a group of women who suffered from radiation poisoning and fought the system.
Radium Girls
WRITER / ARTIST: Cy
ENGLISH TRANSLATOR: Ivanka Hahnenberger
TRIM: 7.5” x 10”
AGE RANGE: General Adult
GENRE: Historical / Labor Rights
SRP: $15
FORMAT: Trade Paperback
PAGE COUNT: 134
PUB DATE: May 3, 2022
ISBN #: 9781945820991
PUBLISHER: Iron Circus Comics
DISTRIBUTOR: Consortium
In Radium Girls, a group of young women who suffered from radiation poisoning while working at a New Jersey watch factory in the 1920s, and their legal battles led to the creation of OSHA and the country’s first workplace safety laws, but their personal stories — their individual hopes and dreams and loves — are often obscured by history.
Cy’s disarmingly soft colored pencil artwork whisks you away in a fast-moving swirl of silent panels and punchy dialogue as we meet the girls at their dinner tables, in the speakeasies where they let their hair down, and of course, at the workstations where daily radium ingestion sealed their fates. It’s there where you experience the first emotional jarring Cy intends, with chilling images of workplace hazards happening directly under the safely protected noses of upper management.
From the moment of the first devastating diagnosis, the action picks up and the girls slowly come to accept they will have to fight the system if they want to make the rest of their short lives mean something. As the hazy pleasures of nights on the town give way to acute disease and death, rendered in somber, respectful individual portraits, Cy builds a brief and powerful introduction to the labor rights case that changed the world, and more importantly, the lives of the women at its heart.
