Maids

By Katie Skelly

2020

First Published

3.19

Average Rating

112

Number of Pages

3H24M

Audio Length

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.

Avg Rating

3.19

Number of Ratings

1,313

5 STARS

4 STARS

26%

3 STARS

43%

2 STARS

19%

1 STARS

goodreads

Author

Katie Skelly

Author · 4 books

Katie Skelly is an American comic book artist, writer, editor and critic. Skelly was born in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania in 1985. She studied Art History at Syracuse University and then at City College of New York. Among her works: Nurse, Nurse (2012, Sparkplug), a 'Barbarella-inspired' sci-fi comic; Operation Margarine (2014, Adhouse), for which she won the Emerging Artist Prize at the 2015 Cartoon Crossroads Columbus Festival; My Pretty Vampire (2017, Fantagraphics), a 70's exploitation-style horror; The Agency (2018, Fantagraphics), a collection of erotic stories previously appeared online; Maids (2020, Fantagraphics), a true crime graphic novel; the ongoing self-produced series Heaven. Skelly has written about comics on the Comics Journal since 2014. She co-hosts the podcast Thick Lines with fellow cartoonist Sally Madden.