A Casual Appreciation of Reactor Girl
Reactor Girl was an anthology series published by Tragedy Strikes Press, and later Drawn & Quarterly, back in the 1990s; it lasted only 6 issues and has long been out-of-print.
Before that... Reactor Girl was a mini-comic that ran 3 issues.
This article takes a look back at those humble beginnings
"Reactor Girl is an anthology book, with an underlying theme of life in the 1990's, and the urban experience. Have fax machines affected the way we love? Probably not... But maybe. How about instant tellers? Have they changed the way we look at life? Could be, Questions like -- and unlike -- these, merit exploration."
So began the "About Reactor Girl" introduction in the November 1990 issue of Reactor Girl. From the 2-colour silkscreen serigraph cover to the 12 digest-sized pages of black and white interior artwork, that thin first issue gave readers their initial glimpse of the title character, as well as a sampling of what was to be expected in future offerings from the aptly-named Extra Small Press.
Conceptualized and produced by Michel Vrana (former Ontario College of Art "General Studies" student, majoring in print-making and photography), Reactor Girl was amongst that rare breed of mini-comic that had a strong editorial vision, production values and was well-designed! Three issues were published from late 1990 to the fall of 1991, each featuring a collection of unique and slightly askew storylines. Michel also chose artists that explored different approaches to the comics narrative; apart from pen and ink renderings, reader's delighted in stories executed via photocopy manipulation, electronic pre-press, fumetti's, pencil drawings and detailed linoleum-block printing! Yep, something different was going on here!!When asked how the Reactor Girl mini came about, Michel replied, "...there were a few things that went toward that. I wanted to do some sort of publication, it was probably going to be a literary publication, like poems and short stories; that was in the back of my mind. Right around that time I was working on some stuff with my friend Kit McAllister, and he drew these pages for the poem Ozymandias by P.B. Shelley. I scanned them in to a computer and manipulated them that way. I basically acted as an inker/colorist and painted over these scanned images with a paint program, assembled them all together and printed them out. Then we had those pages... and they looked kinda' neat, but what do we do with it? We started thinking and thinking, we thought well, maybe we could publish it as a comic 'cause I had just seen some mini-comics around that time, actually I was first exposed to them that year, and we thought maybe we could do a little 6-page mini. We were mulling that about, but we never did it.
"That summer, my friend Ron Lum came back from McMaster University and he had these little sketches of this character called Reactor Girl... and I thought wow, that's a kinda' neat name; it made me think of those really goofy sixties superhero characters, like Saturn Girl! I thought maybe I could draw this Reactor Girl, so I asked Ron if it would be okay and he said to go ahead. I started thinking of storylines, figured I'd make her concerned about living in modern times, but I soon discovered that I probably couldn't sustain a whole book on my own, so I thought perhaps we could have a little Reactor Girl strip, (Kit's) Ozymandias, and I started calling friends and asked them if they would be interested in doing something... and pretty soon we had 12 pages and I thought that was a good start, and figured we could put it out for 50 or 75 cents and see what happened. We were just having fun, we just wanted to put it out there and see what would happen."Many of the contributors to Reactor Girl were new to comics, and as a result brought a certain aesthetic to their work. From the brooding-montage intensity of Robb Lawson, to the mind-numbing irreverence of Ralph Grant to the media-evoked kinetic energy of Kit McAllister, one could sense a certain congruency. And of course, let's not forget the title character, that cherubic denizen of a surrealistic nuclear age: Reactor Girl, as portrayed by Michel Vrana. It was all there, interesting stories and innovative artwork, and the anthology format provided a perfect outlet for these creative individuals.
"Of course, as with any small press publication, there were problems," comments Michel, "finances being the main one... those GST rebate cheques came in real handy!"
Michel Vrana went on to become the Managing Editor of Tragedy Strikes Press, an alternative comics publisher, and while Reactor Girl the mini-comic was dead, Reactor Girl the full-sized 32-page black and white comics anthology of urban tales was very much alive, Michel's mandate was unchanged: "(we encouaged) artists from different creative backgrounds to use aesthetics and techniques of their media to challenge the then existing parameters of comic-book presentation. Writer too, were invited to submit. Writers who may have never written for comic-books, and who may never have conceived of doing so injected freshness into the medium, opening it up to new styles and interpretations."Michel adds, "...everybody more or less grows up with comics, but people who grew up reading Spider-Man and deciding they wanted to be the next Todd McFarlane were going to have a lot of baggage as to what comics were about. However, someone that came from a different background was going to have a fresh approach, whether they were artists or writers. In Reactor Girl we kept the theme of life in the modern urban environment... to have flow between the stories. I found that with many anthologies there is just no direction... the stories were all over the place. With a theme as we had, things were pretty open, and a common link was maintained. I think that helped keep it an interesting book."
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