French Cartoonist Cy uses her colored pencil artwork to take readers through the world of the Radium Girls, a group of young women who suffered from radiation poisoning after working in a New Jersey watch factory. Their suffering lead to the creation of OSHA in American workplaces to ensure safety laws. Cy has created a graphic novel to show the humanity of the women who suffered.
Here’s what the press release says:
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.
Radium Girls comes to comic stores May 3, 2022.
Check out the preview below:
