Drawing beyond the lines

"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.