Katie Skelly

Katie Skelly is a cartoonist. Her previous comics include My Pretty Vampire, The Agency, Operation Margarine, and Nurse Nurse. She is a contributor to The Comics Journal. Christine Papin, an overworked live-in maid, is reunited with her younger sister, Lea, who has also been hired by the wealthy Lancelin family. They make the estate’s beds, scrub the floors, and spy on the domestic strife within its walls. What starts as petty theft by the maids, shortly turns into something more nefarious. Madame Lancelin’s increasingly unhinged abuse ignites the sisters’ toxic upbringing and their feelings about class privileges and it all explodes into a ghastly double murder. The event shocked and fascinated 1930s France and beyond. Maids (Fantagraphics) has high bravura and high intrigue, all drawn in Skelly’s highly stylized manner, which combines the best of pop art, manga, and Eurocomics. Publishers Weekly called it a ” subversive horror story [that} will satisfy readers who like their crime stories served with gender and class analysis and a pretty whipped topping.”