Journalism has changed a lot since the Victorian era, but the ideals that it represents — truth, transparency, and fairness — remain the same. Too many outlets these days have embraced an increasingly credulous and partisan approach, so the need for brave, honest reporting is more acute than ever. The reasons for this need, and what journalists can accomplish by fulfilling it, is the subject of a new graphic novel.
Renegade Girls, written by Nora Neus and drawn by Julie Robine, is the heavily fictionalized story of Nell Cusack, a “stunt-girl reporter” who exposed the deplorable conditions that factory workers, primarily immigrant women and girls, had to work under. With help from Alice, a talented (and pretty) photographer, as well as Lucia, a friend who works in the factories, Nell finds the strength to publish the truth and push for much-needed labor reforms — and break free of her family’s expectations.
For a brief time, the type of stunt reporting that Nell engages in made big headlines and brought real changes across the United States. In the comic, Nell cites Nellie Bly as her inspiration. Bly, whose Ten Days in a Mad-House received its own graphic novel ,and other “stunt girls” went undercover to expose injustice and force those in power to make changes. And it worked: Bly’s exposé forced an investigation into the asylum she infiltrated, while Nell’s led to increased legal protections for Illinois workers.
“The stunt girls were remarkable, breaking every boundary that the society of late 19th-century America expected of women,” Robine told me in an email interview.
Neus added, “As a female journalist myself, I’d heard of the famous Nellie Bly but didn’t know there was a whole cadre of young women undercover reporters who came after her known as the Stunt Girls….I couldn’t stop thinking about Nell.”
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Not all of the tactics used by these reporters would pass muster today. Even in the Victorian era, the public’s admiration was short-lived, and the stunt girls were soon dismissed as sensationalists.
“Perhaps there’s some truth to that claim for certain stories or certain reporters,” says Neus, “but I don’t think it’s fair to paint all stunt girls with that broad brush. These women, often young girls, were doing brave undercover investigative reporting at considerable risk to themselves.”
As a journalist, Neus has covered critical subjects like war and natural disasters. In that capacity, she states that there is nothing more important than reporting the facts as they happen. But as a fiction writer, she was better able to write a “moving, entertaining, emotional, and powerful story” by altering or outright inventing certain aspects of her subjects’ lives.
For example, Nell and Alice did really exist, but their romantic relationship is fictitious (although Alice was openly queer). This creative license led to greater storytelling opportunities for both Robine and Neus. As an artist, Robine used the colors of the characters’ dresses to crush stereotypes.
“It’s not mutually exclusive to wear a feminine color [like pink] and do hard work,” she says. She also used her art to create a visual Easter egg. “When you combine [Nell and Alice’s] main colors […] they form the lesbian flag!”
For Neus, pushing past the initial discomfort of fictionalizing the lives of real people allowed her to better represent “marginalized queer people as the heroines” of an important story.
The stunt girls may be gone, but their legacy continued in the work of reporters like Ida Tarbell, who helped bring down the infamous Standard Oil trust, and Daphne Caruana Galizia, whose anti-corruption reporting led to her assassination in 2017. Thanks to Renegade Girls, a new generation of readers will learn about the very real heroism of their journalistic forebears.
Source : This Graphic Novel Uses Fiction to Explore Important Facts
