So this is Cassandra Calin. No, seriously, that’s her. She’s a 21-year-old comic artist, illustrator, and graphic designer based in Montreal, Canada, and possibly an up-and-coming social media celebrity.
Her true-to-life humor and spot-on drawings already earned her some 80,000 followers on her Facebook page. But she aims higher with her dreams—and we'll get to that in a while.
When I first encountered her drawings online, it occurred to me that she’s probably the funniest girl I’ve seen on the Internet, and so it was with quite some appreciation that I read her positive response to my email interview request.
Calin’s family is from Romania but they moved to Canada when she was 10. “Because I was very young, I never truly felt a culture shock,” she said. “I learned French in a matter of months, I already knew a bit of English from playing video games and watching Cartoon Network and I quickly made new friends.” She still misses her family and friends back in Romania though and visits every once in a while during summer.
In hindsight, it’s not hard to see how she ended up being a comic artist. “I am not exaggerating when I say that I’ve been drawing all my life,” she said.
In a Q&A with her fans she revealed she started as a self-taught furniture “beautifier.”
“That was actually real and a genuine apology to my mum and dad,” she explained to me. “I scribbled on their furniture and thankfully, eventually switched to drawing on paper.”
Thankfully indeed.
Though her family “had a great sense of humor,” drawing on furniture can be traumatizing—for parents.
Despite being “surrounded by people who always enjoyed having a good laugh,” Calin was never a funny person in the sense of being a classroom clown.
“No, no! I was the shy and quiet girl who was always sketching or drawing caricatures of the teachers during lectures,” she explained.
