By Katie Skelly (Fantagraphics Books)
ISBN: 978-1-68396-368-4 (HB/Digital edition)
This book includes Discriminatory Content included for dramatic and literary effect.
Illustrator Katie Skelly hails from Brooklyn by way of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania and caught the comics bug early, thanks to her newsstand owner dad. Her Barbarella inspired series Nurse, Nurse began after graduating from Syracuse University with a BA in Art History and becoming a postgrad at City College of New York. Thanks to her inquisitive insights, striking art style and potent narrative voice, Skelly has been the subject of many gallery shows and is a star on the global lecture circuit. She has been agonisingly quiet of late but hopefully there are more wonders in store (Sorry! No Pressure!)
Her first graphic novel – again inspired by Gallic trailblazer Jean-Claude Forrest but also with seductive scents and flavours of horror-meister director Dario Argento – was My Pretty Vampire (2017), supplemented by latter collections Operation Margarine and The Agency. All her works ask uncomfortable questions about the role and (permissible) position of women in society, as seen through exploitation genres of mass entertainment, and that’s never been more effectively explored than in this “semi-autobiographical” tome recounting the true-crime story of the Papin sisters.
History says that on February 2, 1933, former convent girls Christine and Léa (working as maids for the wealthy Lancelin family in Le Mans) bludgeoned and stabbed to death Madame Léonie and her daughter Genevieve. The case was manifestly open & shut, but became a Cause Celebre in France following reports of the killers’ early lives and years of service and physical abuse becoming public. Intellectuals championed the Papin sisters and the case was cited as a perfect example of the dangers of inequality and privilege…
In this graphic re-evaluation, Skelly brings her own incisive interpretation to the case, and it’s a little gem that you will find hard to put down and impossible to forget…
Verdict? Read this book.
© 2020 Katie Skelly. This edition © 2020 Fantagraphics Books, Inc. All rights reserved.