'Les Sisters'.
William Maury is a French comic book artist and colorist, who works under the pen names Wilmaury and William. He worked on a couple of semi-realistic comic albums before lending his dynamic drawing style to the humorous gag comic 'Les Sisters' (2007) at Éditions Bamboo. Written by Christophe Cazenove, the series is one of the best-selling contemporary children's comics, and has been adapted into an animated TV series in 2017.
'Commissaire Magret'.
Early life
Maury was born in 1969 in Millau, a commune in the Aveyron department in the south of France. The artist still resides in this area, only know in the nearby commune Creissels. A self-taught artist, he ranks André Franquin, Frank Margerin, Morris and Enki Bilal as major influences on his work. He started out working as a portrait artist, and as an artist for regional magazines, such as Aveyron Mag, Lozère Mag and Cantal Mag.
Commissaire Maigret
One of his early creations was 'Les Enquêtes Culinaires Humoristiques du Commissaire Magret', about the culinary investigations of an elderly commissioner and his sexy sidekick. The stories are an obvious parody of Belgian novelist Georges Simenon's 'Inspector Maigret'.
Comics in the late 1990s and early 2000s
In 1999 his art was present in the two 'Mystic Compeyre' (1999-2000) fanzines, which collected work by artists from the Aveyron region on the occasion of the Compeyre comic festival. Among the other represented artists were Gury, Aigouy, Chastan Libourel and DAF. With writer Philippe Ajalbert he made a historical comic set during the Hundred Years' War, called 'Alban de Montcausson'. It was serialized in Aveyron Mag in 2003 and later also published in book format.
'Baraka'.
Baraka & other comics for Ciné 9
After meeting the publisher Emmanuel Proust at the Angoulême comic festival, Maury got the opportunity to reach a national audience. For Proust's Ciné 9 collection, he drew two albums of the thriller comedy series 'Baraka' (2004-2005), written by French film director and screenwriter Georges Lautner. For the same publisher, Maury worked as a colorist for the collection of Agatha Christie adaptations (2005-2006), and for artist Nicolas Otéro on the series 'AmeriKKKa' (2007) and 'Bonecreek' (2007-2010).
Les Sisters
In addition to his daytime job, William Maury created some black-and-white comics inspired by his two daughters, Wendy and Marine. He posted them on the Baywin.net forum in early 2006, and then on his own blog, which he called 'Un air de famille'. The project caught on, and by 2007 Maury signed a deal with Éditions Bamboo to create an album series. 'Un air de famille' (2008) became the title of the first installment, while the series was renamed to 'Les Sisters'. For the plots, Maury was paired with Christophe Cazenove, one of the top writers of Bamboo's humor series. From now on, the artist signed his work with merely his first name, William.
Wendy is the elder sister, an average teenage girl who likes to hang out with her girlfriends and her boyfriend Maxence. She often clashes with her baby sister Marine, a naïve and playfully impulsive girl who mixes up expressions and follows her sister around wherever she goes. While most of the gags are set in everyday life, some episodes take place in a fantasy world in which the girls are superheroines, or in a preview of their future lives as young adults. The series was an instant hit, and has been translated into several other languages, including English, Dutch, German and Polish. It also runs on a weekly base in the Dutch girls' magazine Tina. Éditions Bamboo has released several related books starring the two sisters, including a cookbook, a 3D comic, a novel series and a diary, while spin-off albums with longer stories of the superhero counterparts 'Les Super-Sisters' have been published since 2011. In 2017 the series was adapted into an animated TV series by the Parisian studio SAMKA Productions. The first series of 52 eleven minute episodes was broadcast on M6 from August 2017 onwards.
'Les Super-Sisters'.
Tizombi
In addition to their hit series, Maury and Cazenove launched 'Tizombi' in 2017. The origin of this character also lies in an earlier strip Maury had posted on his blog back in 2009. The main character is a cute baby zombie, who nonetheless devours everything that crosses his path, with the exception of his human friend Margotik.
Graphic contributions
William Maury has also contributed to 'Le Galerie des Gaffes' (2017), a collective tribute album to André Franquin's 'Gaston Lagaffe'.
'Tizombi'.