Skip to main content

Cassandra Calin – Turning Everyday Awkwardness Into Relatable Comics

 

Cassandra Calin

Cassandra Calin is a Romanian-born Canadian cartoonist, illustrator, humorist, and graphic novelist whose work has a particular talent for making everyday awkwardness feel funny, honest, and surprisingly relatable.

Originally from Romania, Calin immigrated to Canada as a child and later studied graphic design at l'Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM). Her own experiences of growing up, relationships, insecurities, curly hair, and the small frustrations of everyday life became the inspiration for her semi-autobiographical webcomic series, Cassandra Comics.

From Webcomics to Graphic Novels

Calin first became known for her online comics, where she turns ordinary experiences into short, humorous observations. Her work often focuses on things that can feel embarrassing or frustrating in everyday life, but become much funnier when we can step back and laugh at ourselves.

That combination of humor and honesty eventually led to I Left the House Today!, a collection of her comics.

Her move into longer-form storytelling came with The New Girl, her graphic novel debut.

The New Girl Series

The New Girl follows Lia, a young Romanian girl who moves to Montreal with her family and has to adapt to an entirely new environment. She is dealing with a new country, a new language, new friendships, puberty, and all the awkwardness that comes with being a young teenager.

What makes the series particularly appealing is that Calin doesn't make Lia unrealistically mature. Her problems matter because they matter to her, while still feeling appropriately young.

The second book, First Crush, continues Lia's story as she becomes more settled in Canada but discovers that growing up hasn't necessarily become easier. Her friendships, relationship with her mother, first crush, and relationship with herself are all tested.

Both books combine humor with subjects that young readers may genuinely be experiencing, including menstruation, body changes, friendship problems, first love, insecurity, and the consequences of making mistakes.

Humor With a Human Touch

Whether she is drawing about her own experiences or creating stories for younger readers, Cassandra Calin seems particularly interested in the gap between how we think life is supposed to go and how awkward it actually is.

That is probably what makes her comics so easy to connect with.

Her humor isn't based on making her characters perfect. Quite the opposite. Calin finds comedy in insecurity, uncomfortable situations, unrealistic expectations, and the little disasters that make up ordinary life.

That makes her work feel warm rather than cynical.

Cassandra Calin's Impact

With The New Girl, Calin has successfully brought the sensibility of her personal comics into a longer coming-of-age story. The first book became a bestseller and won the Janet Savage Blachford Prize for Children's and Young Adult Literature in 2025.

With First Crush, she has continued Lia's story rather than simply repeating the first book's formula. The result is a series that grows alongside its protagonist, dealing with increasingly complicated emotions while maintaining the humor and warmth that make Calin's work so appealing.

For young readers, her books offer something particularly valuable: stories about growing up that don't pretend it's either perfect or terrible.

Sometimes it is just awkward, confusing, funny, embarrassing, and completely normal.

And Cassandra Calin knows how to make that entertaining.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Handmaid’s Tale – From Brilliant to Frustrating

  When The Handmaid’s Tale first aired, it felt sharp, terrifying, and painfully necessary. I wrote about the first season as a dark and brilliant adaptation, one that used restraint, symbolism, and dread to tell its story. Now that I've finished the third season, my opinion has shifted — not wholly, but noticeably. The show is still good . Sometimes very good. But it also became frustrating, uneven, and less powerful than it could have been. June Osborne: From Survivor to Exhaustion Let’s talk about June (Elisabeth Moss, Mad Men ). I understand the idea behind her arc. She was meant to evolve — to become more confident, more assertive, more dangerous. A woman shaped by trauma who stops surviving and starts fighting back. On paper, it makes sense. On screen, however, it often doesn’t work. June becomes reckless to the point of irresponsibility. She repeatedly puts others in danger without seeming to fully care about who might be caught in the crossfire. Her actions feel impuls...
Post a Comment
Read more

Grief in the Shadows: Why 'The Silencing' Stands Out

  A moody thriller about grief, violence, and how far we go for the ones we love. Nikolaj Coster-Waldau ( Game of Thrones ) is Rayburn Swanson , a former hunter who now lives in isolation, running a wildlife sanctuary named after his missing daughter. Years after she vanished, Rayburn is just barely functioning—haunted, grieving, and clinging to the hope that she might still return. When a murdered girl turns up in the woods with eerie similarities to his daughter's disappearance, the local sheriff, Alice Gustafson ( Annabelle Wallis ), launches an investigation. Rayburn, meanwhile, accidentally crosses paths with a mysterious masked figure hunting a girl on his land. This encounter pulls him into the heart of the case in ways he never expected. The investigation twists, misleads, and slowly unravels, building toward a reveal that isn’t obvious—and intentionally so. Nothing is as straightforward as it seems. Themes of Grief and Family What makes The Silencing compelling is...
Post a Comment
Read more

Gangsta Granny – Hilarious and Surprisingly Moving

  I have a ten-year-old daughter, and one thing we like to do is read the same books so we can talk about them afterward. Gangsta Granny was a birthday gift for her, and she read it so quickly that it immediately made me curious. When a child finishes a book that fast, you know something is working. When I finally read it myself, I was pleasantly surprised — and completely charmed. A Story That Is Funny and Moving At first glance, Gangsta Granny is a crazy, over-the-top, and very funny story. David Walliams clearly knows how to make children laugh, using absurd situations, exaggerated characters, and a fast-moving plot that keeps young readers hooked. But beneath the humour, the book is also sweet, touching, and emotionally rich. What starts as a wild adventure slowly reveals a story about family, loneliness, empathy, and learning to truly see the people around us. This balance reminded me of Roald Dahl’s books , where outrageous humour and emotional depth coexist effortles...
Post a Comment
Read more