Hands All Red:

A review from writer and cartoonist KM Bezner about the bold brutality in Katie Skelly’s Maids from Fantagraphics, 2020

Katie Skelly’s latest outstanding horror comic Maids opens with a gory promise to its readers: keep reading to discover whose bloody eyeball is rolling across the floor.

Although, if you’re a true crime fan you may already know the answer: Maids is based on the story of Christine and Léa Papin, two sisters working as servants in a wealthy household who in 1933 butchered their employer Léonie Lancelin and her daughter Genevieve. But even if you’re already familiar with the case, which sparked debates over class conflict and criminal accountability in early 20th century France, you’ll be pleasantly surprised by Skelly’s fantastic retelling that somehow makes this creepy story even creepier.

I didn’t know Maids was based on a true story until the very last page, on which Skelly included a few brief sentences on the fates of the Papin sisters. The shock of realization sent me into a research fury fueled by Google and Wikipedia, during which I discovered that many of the elements of Skelly’s story were rooted in fact, and others in the speculation of the time. She takes advantage of the distorted view of history and treats it as a playground, filling in some gaps and leaving others as an invitation to readers: come play with me.

By muddying the distinctions between reality and rumor, Maids displays what Choo, in the introduction to their visceral art book Tender (Shortbox, 2019) , calls “messy, bloody intimacy in a pretty frame,” and gives readers the freedom to explore “things that can be enjoyed in fiction that aren’t right or acceptable in real life.” But of course this event did happen, though we as viewers removed by time and perspective can only imagine what may have been going through Christine and Léa’s minds as these events unfolded, adding an element of voyeurism that is familiar to any fan of horror movies and true crime podcasts.

Skelly seems to agree with Choo on the pleasure of splashing color through these typically shrouded spaces. The most immediately striking element of Skelly’s storytelling is her visual style: her use of bold lines and colors mirror horror films of the ’70s. The style choice is fitting on the heels of her graphic novel My Pretty Vampire, which was heavily influenced by the “aggressively pointless” works of Jean Rollin. The sometimes cartoonish viscera on screen in Rollin’s campy, exploitative films and others of this brand is as bright and dramatic as the red splashed across the pages of Maids. Skelly simplifies the hyper-stylizations of these films, depicting grotesque acts of violence honestly and strikingly, but at a haunting emotional distance. That distance is a built in boundary that reflects the way the sisters seem to be disconnected from their own horrific actions.

Maids’ sense of detachment is further exploited through Skelly’s expert flourish of supernaturalism. A disembodied voice that seems to be coming from within Léa slithers into the narrative at key moments. Who or what this voice belongs to is left open to interpretation: could this speaker be a suggestion of Léa’s madness, or a more sinister controlling force? Whatever it is, Skelly scatters moments throughout the story that suggest that Léa may not be completely aware of or even in control of her own actions. She floats through much of the narrative like a leaf caught in the current that is her sister Christine. The fact that we only have access to Léa’s internal narrative and not her sister’s places the reader in the same position: we too are subject to the ebb and flow of Christine’s whims. “In the times you don’t feel strong...just be me,” she tells Léa. And so Léa’s behaviors start to mirror Christine’s, until the moment when together they butcher Léonie and Genevieve.

But this sense of control extends far beyond Christine‘s reach. Snapshots of Léa’s life without her sister suggest that perhaps Léa has never fully been herself, or had a self to consider her own. The beheading of a small bird—even though it’s established that she cannot stand the sight of blood—and the mystery of Léa’s red-stained hands, supposedly a sign of how hateful she is, are cruel omens for the violence that is to come, and imply a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy that it is impossible for Léa to escape. Skelly describes these “petty acts of aggression” as a way for Léa to quietly and anonymously exert her will on the world around her, though what that will may be is unknown to us.

Much like the debates surrounding the sisters’ imprisonment in reality, Skelly deploys short flashbacks to elicit a small amount of sympathy for Christine and Léa. The depiction of their abusive mother, distrustful nuns, and cruel employer make the bitter ending of this story feel inevitable: if the actions of the Papin sisters are the result of a lifetime of abuse, mental illness, and degradation, are those who mistreated them not also implicated? To what extent is it the responsibility of the justice system to address complications and contributing circumstances? Questions like these are the extended epilogue to Maids that will haunt the reader as much as the sisters’ casual slaughter. 

KM Bezner is a queer critic, poet, and fiction writer currently based in Boston. Her work has been published in The Masters Review, Women Write About Comics, Multiversity Comics, Comics Alliance, and elsewhere. When she’s not writing, KM draws, reads comics, and watches horror movies. You can find her in most places @kmbezner.