The Sisters #8: My NEW Big Sister by Christophe Cazenove & William Maury

Our favorite squabbling sisters in translation are back, from the dynamic creative duo of Cazenove & William! In this latest volume, Maureen and Wendy’s quarreling is getting so bad that their friends are setting up interventions. Can any of their efforts prevail against the tsunami-level bickering of the girls?

Wendy is the older sibling, a dark-haired teenager with the physical benefits of strength, size and speed. She has two best friends who are deeply concerned by the escalation of hostilities, and a boyfriend, Mason, who is as often the target of Maureen’s pranks as he is her co-conspirator, unwitting or otherwise.

Maureen is the blonde younger girl, an irrepressible ball of mischief who loves her stuffed animals and just wants to hang out with her older sister, whether Wendy wants to or not. The girls usually get along, but each reaches their breaking point in this volume, to the point where Maureen decides to start looking for a replacement big sister instead.

I gotta tell you, as an elder sister to a deeply annoying younger sister myself, I always have feels whenever I read this series. I’m definitely Team Wendy, tho very much appreciate how evenhandedly this creative team depicts the girls and their relationship. My favorite panels are usually the ones set when Wendy and Maureen have grown up, and look back more or less fondly on the things that used to drive them absolutely bananas as children. It was nice in this volume to get throwbacks too to when the sisters were even younger, to see exactly how long their tensions have persisted.

That said, the fact that the story is mostly broken up into single-page vignettes doesn’t make for the smoothest reading. The narrative is fractured in favor of gags, but that’s totally fine for a target audience with short attention spans. Given this target audience, I was actually pretty impressed by how relatively sophisticated the art is. The line work is impeccable, with kinetic action and just a lovely kind of French style* that ably swings between cuteness and beauty as needed. The most impressive part of the art, however, was the luminous color work. Digital art makes this process easier than ever, but it still takes a discerning eye to put it all together in a way that makes readers sit up and take notice.

*The comic was published initially in French, and was translated for the US market by Nanette McGuinness.

The Sisters #8: My NEW Big Sister by Christophe Cazenove & William Maury was published November 29 2022 by Papercutz and is available from all good booksellers, including