Right About Now

Author notes

Right About Then: The Triangle Shirtwaist Fire

jandrewworld

on March 27, 2011

I am excited about this comic for two reasons: 1) I got to slightly change my style and I found it fun to draw and 2) I got to draw short pants. Apparently I have been itching to do this and I didn’t realize it. If you are not familiar with the Triangle ShirtWaist Fire, which happened 100 years ago Friday, it was the event which galvanized the nation and gave us a defined work week, a weekend, child labor laws and a minimum wage. Sadly, these lessons are lost as corporations who the Republicans give our tax dollars to, take their jobs to places like Bangladesh which repeated the tragedy at Triangle ShirtWaist Co. If you are not familiar with this tragedy, please check out a few resources: The Wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triangle_Shirtwaist_Factory_fire PBS made a good documentary about it: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/triangle/player/ and NPR has quite a few articles and podcasts about this fire, but I recommend listening to this: http://www.npr.org/2011/03/24/134814089/Triangle-Fire-Remembrance because listening to that inspired me to write this.

Also, can anyone guess who the character in this strip is named after? If you are wondering, he wasn’t alive when the fire happened, but interestingly enough, both the founders of National Comics had connections to the fire, Jack Liebowitz, whose dad worked with the women of Triangle in their protest and Harry Donenfeld who claims his wife worked there. With Donenfeld, you never knew how much he said was true, because he was always contradicting himself. However if you want to learn more about them and Jacob Kurtzberg, please read Men of Tomorrow by Gerard Jones.