Little Red Fox and White Fox, the central characters of Yang Zhi's The Fox's Transformation Chronicle.

Cy leads a workshop at the festival, introducing participants to the fundamentals of composition and visual storytelling.

Yang Zhi creates a live illustration at the 10th French Comics and Graphic Novels Festival.

Female workers in Cy's Radium Girls, whose health is damaged by prolonged exposure to radium while working at a watch factory.

At the 10th French Comics and Graphic Novels Festival in Beijing this May, two young women wearing glasses sat side by side, though they appeared to come from entirely different worlds.

One was Yang Zhi, a Chinese cartoonist with shoulder-length black hair and a quiet, studious air. The other was French comics artist Cy (Cyrielle Evrard), whose cropped hair and understated style carried the effortless cool of a heroine from a late-night French film.

Yang draws on a digital tablet. Cy prefers colored pencils. One tells stories rooted in Chinese fox-spirit folklore; the other resurrects forgotten industrial tragedies from American history.

Their artistic styles couldn't be more different, yet their careers have followed remarkably similar paths.

At nearly the same age, both women left stable jobs to pursue comics independently. Both built audiences online through social media and both eventually arrived at the same conclusion: they no longer wanted other people deciding what they were allowed to create.

Socializing a fox

"When I dropped everything else and focused entirely on comics, that was when I felt happiest," Yang says.

Two years ago, she began publishing an online comic titled The Fox's Transformation Chronicle. The story follows a young fox surviving alone in the wilderness before being rescued by an older white fox who teaches her the art of shape-shifting. By observing human desires, the fox learns to transform into the "ideal version" of whatever others expect — a process of cultivation on the path toward becoming a nine-tailed fox.

Told through the eyes of a mythical creature, the work explores gender, shifting power structures and social norms. It quickly attracted a loyal online following and was published in print in 2025.

Before that success, Yang worked as a storyboard artist for film and television productions, translating scripts into visual sequences. She entered the animation industry during a boom period for Chinese cinema and contributed to several major projects. Yet, after four years, she felt increasingly disconnected from her work.

"I draw every day, but not the things I actually want to draw."

That feeling became especially clear in projects involving fox spirits from Chinese folklore.

"We tend to imagine fox spirits as seductive, dangerous figures," she says. "Then, over time, they become harmless little creatures, or girls who need to be saved. But why is it that when a fox turns into a human, a female fox always becomes a woman and a male fox always becomes a man?"

The question lingered. Thinking about a cat she once observed — an animal unlikely to perceive beauty as humans do — she began wondering whether fictional foxes were simply being forced into the human's expectations of appearance and desire.

To tell a different story, she left her storyboard work behind and spent eight months creating The Fox's Transformation Chronicle. She never expected it to become popular.

"If I chase popularity, my choices become limited," she says. "I want to make what I want to make, not what other people expect from me."

That philosophy echoes the comic's narrative. At one point, the female fox transforms into a man and discovers freedoms unavailable in female form. She experiences the rewards of human ambition. However, at a banquet celebrating her political rise, she is served the white fox who first taught her to become human. At that moment, she realizes that no matter how perfectly she imitates what humans want to see, the effort is ultimately meaningless.

"Caring too much about what other people think is, to me, a false problem," Yang adds. Although the work is now being adapted into an animated film, she resists being described as especially "talented".

"Talent isn't something you can simply claim," she says. "If people resonate with the work, it spreads. If they don't, it doesn't."

Her next project will follow the same principle: expression first, persuasion never. She has little interest in convincing people of anything.

Radium Girls still glows

Cy's decision to leave her previous job came after an argument with her boss.

By then, she had already built a growing online audience by sharing sketches, unfinished comic pages and fragments of everyday life. Social media made the move into freelance work feel less like a leap and more like the natural next step.

"I'm not someone who hides away to create," she says.

She enjoys posting work while it is still evolving and hearing readers' reactions in real time. "As a freelancer, you have to use social media. Without it, things become very difficult."

The book she brought to the festival, Radium Girls, began with an article she discovered online. At first, she assumed the title referred to an American rock band. Later, she discovered the real story.

In 1918, at a clock factory in New Jersey, young women were hired to paint watch dials with luminous paint containing radioactive radium. They were instructed to "lick, dip, and paint" their brushes repeatedly, unaware of the danger. Over time, many developed severe illnesses — losing teeth, becoming paralyzed, and eventually dying. Their legal battles later helped shape some of the earliest worker protection laws in the United States.

Radium Girls retells that history. First published in France in 2020, it later appeared in North America in 2022 and China in 2025.

Cy was drawn to the story partly because it remains relatively unknown. These women, as she puts it, "disappeared into the smoke". But she was equally struck by how relevant the story remains today.

"Whenever scientists discover a new element or material that can be industrialized, workers are exposed first," she says. "At first there are one or two cases. Then, after many deaths, it becomes headline news. And then it disappears again, until the next material comes along."

To reconstruct the story, she immersed herself in archival research, reading victims' diaries, and studying the details of early 20th-century factories, down to industrial locks and machine parts.

Not all of Cy's work centers on historical events, but she intentionally engages with social themes. She believes artists should remain actively involved in society rather than stand apart from it.

In France, comics artists typically work as freelancers, a lifestyle that often brings financial instability. But for Cy, autonomy outweighs insecurity. It is one reason she has no desire to return to office work.

When publishers take on a project, they usually provide an advance against future royalties. If a book performs poorly, the author keeps the advance. If it succeeds, royalties are paid on top.

The arrangement, she says, allows creators to keep working without being financially crushed by a single setback.

"If a book doesn't sell well," she says pragmatically, "I just move on to the next one and find another editor."

At the festival's Beijing stop, Yang and Cy joined French comics artist Catherine Meurisse and Chinese comics artist Yu Kun onstage for a conversation with readers. One audience member asked whether commercial projects sharpen an artist's voice or slowly wear it down.

Neither Yang nor Cy seemed especially enthusiastic about working for others.

Yang says she has always wanted to tell her own stories, but struggled for years simply to begin. She recalls making bets with friends: if they failed to finish a script outline within a week, they would owe each other 50 yuan. "In the end," she says with a laugh, "we each ended up owing the other 500."

Cy says commercial projects often move in circles. An idea approved at the start can be revised repeatedly, only to return months later to its original form.

Recently, a new phrase has gained traction online: "one-person company" — the idea that a single creator can build an audience, produce work, and distribute it independently. Social media, AI tools and digital platforms have made that kind of independence feel increasingly attainable.

Both artists also offer advice to younger creators, drawn from their own experiences.

"When I want to make something," Yang says, "I don't calculate the cost first. I don't start by asking whether it will make money."

Cy echoes the sentiment: trust the value of your own work and never underestimate it.

Contact the writer at baishuhao@chinadaily.com.cn