Maids is out October 13, 2020. — **Maids** is out October 13, 2020.

By Zack Quaintance — There is an uncanny sense of assuredness within cartoonist Katie Skelly’s new book Maids, a supreme narrative confidence that is present from the start, perhaps even from the dedication, which simply reads To My Sister. Maids — published this month by Fantagraphics Books — tells the true (crime) story of the Papin Sisters. I won’t go into much detail about who the sisters are or what they did, noting that they were French maids entangled in a crime in the early 20th Century. The events in this book will surely be unknown to most readers, although they are of wide enough interest to have garnered their own entry on Wikipedia.

Anyway, this real world background is important for the purposes of evaluating and discussing Maids, because it is a key building block for Skelly’s storytelling. With the story of the Papin Sisters, Skelly has wisely chosen a tale that is simple on its exterior — a murder case, motivated by abuse between employee and employer — and it is because she has these clear events to give her narrative momentum that she is able to set about using her ample cartooning and storytelling talents to plumb the emotional depths of those involved, namely the titular maids. What results is a work that is perhaps minimalistic — both in terms of its striking cartooning style as well as its terse and infrequent dialogue — that will read quickly yet linger with its audience far longer.

There were almost two layers to how I processed Maids after reading. The first quality of the book that grabbed me was the deep humanity of its main characters, who in the hands of other creators may have been portrayed far differently. There could have been an understandable impulse to take these characters in one of two extreme directions. The first would have been to make them class war heroes. Our story takes place in the late 1920s and early 1930s, a time of great excess for some and massive income inequality for all. It’s not an American story, but there are hints of the culture and glut of indulgence found in The Great Gatsby. With that in mind, the sisters could have been portrayed as justified in all that they did, fighting back against injustice and oppression, against rotten and impossible circumstances. But this book doesn’t engage in something as pandering nor simplistic. It would have been too easy, too neat. On the other extreme, they could have also been portrayed as criminally insane, driven to lose themselves and who they are by mistreatment, subsumed by violence. The way Skelly chooses to depict them, however, is nuanced and humanistic.

See, the structure in Maids is divided by chapters, which Skelly uses at times to incorporate backstory out of chronology at the exact right moments, giving us glimpses of what the maids have been through, the events that have shaped their values, and the way that life has slowly pushed them to be capable of the things they do. We get just enough of their mother, just enough of their past relationship, just enough of some of their lives outside their current work as maids. It’s all doled out with supreme confidence, pushing the main narrative along rather than distracting from it.

The second layer to how I thought about Maids upon finishing had to do with the visual details Skelly choose to include. There is one scene that has stuck with me more than any other after putting down this book: in it, the sisters find that their employer’s cat has hunted a rat (yet again), one that appears to be wriggling and alive. On closer inspection, they find that the rat is not alive — it’s actually wriggling because it is filled with maggots. One of the sisters takes a maggot, and puts it under a strawberry atop a cake she is serving to her employer and some party guests (one of whom has come on to her). It’s not the worst thing we see in this book (that comes later), but it’s a quick and disturbing detail given an entire panel at the bottom of a chapter-ending page, and it that plays into the way the maids are feeling, the mistreatment they are receiving, and the many powerful metaphors layered into the plot (who is the cat? who is the prey? who is really sick here?).

And that’s really just the tip of what worked for me with this book. There’s so much to this story, to the cartooning, and to the narrative choices. The book is a quick read that demands an instant return, a second pass to search for answers to the question of how the cartoonist used this story to evoke such powerful thoughts and ideas. Ultimately, Maids will immerse readers and leave them with a sense of having consumed a story of importance, one that takes odd true crime specifics and speaks to powerful universals.

Graphic Novel Review - Maids by Katie Skelly

Maids
Writer/Artist: Katie Skelly
Publisher: Fantagraphics Books
The scandalous true crime story about the Papin Sisters, as told by one of comics' most stylized talents. 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 that routinely occurs within its walls. What starts as petty theft by the maids ― who are flashing back to their tumultuous time in a convent ― shortly turns into something more nefarious. Madame Lancelin’s increasingly unhinged abuse ignites the sisters' toxic upbringing and social class exploitation and explodes into a ghastly double murder, an event that shocked and fascinated 1930s France and beyond. Maids has high bravura and high intrigue, all drawn in Skelly’s highly stylized manner, which combines the best of pop art, manga, and Eurocomics.
Price: $12.99
Release Date: October 13, 2020
Buy It Digitally: Maids by Katie Skelly

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Zack Quaintance is a tech reporter by day and freelance writer by night/weekend. He Tweets compulsively about storytelling and comics as Comics Bookcase.