'til the Blood Runs Red: Katie Skelly's My Pretty Vampire

(originally published at Loser City)

Katie Skelly hits all the 'feels.' Her comics bristle with verve, emotion and an 'it' factor best expressed as je ne sais quoi. What's easier, by far, to say (and see) is how she has honed her craft. Skelly is a cartoonist on the rise as her peers have confirmed. With Nurse Nurse, her 2012 debut, Skelly was able to get by on the charm of her idiosyncratic style and the risqué silliness of a story about nurses in space. In Operation Margarine (2014) she takes the sleazy low-brow trope of biker babes and elevates it to a modern morality tale of friendship, self-sacrifice, female empowerment and redemption. In between these two major works, Skelly has serialized a sex-positive-Barbarella-homage on-line porn comic, Agent 8, on slutist.

If Nurse Nurse and Operation Margarine are the major planets and Agent 8 is some kind of kinky satellite of love in the ever expanding Skelly-verse than the digital only Tonya—a skating fantasy comic about, yep, Tonya Harding—would be a whole other solar system, a recent discovery of the gravity and vastness of Skelly's talent. As if the pathos of Harding's real life story of wasn't enough, Skelly, with an equable and non-judgmental resolve, anatomizes Harding's highly toxic relationships, vulnerability and frustration as a woman amongst other competitive women and the damage therein. And all in twelve pages. The deeper tragedy Skelly wrings out of Harding's story comes from an exploration of how it must feel to be a top competitor and yet (almost) always finish out of the money, not a loser, but something far worse and far more human. Skelly shows how a metaphorical loser is perhaps better off than her real life equal. That's art. And it takes some ballsy ninja-storytelling skills to pull off such a feat. The implications on the final page of Tonya and the revelation that occurs in its final panel devastates in a way that's exclusive to comics, a last single frozen frame that sez it's all fucked (dearest) and you're (partly) to blame.

As Tonya was turning triple axels in Skelly's mind, she was also developing My Pretty Vampire on her tumblr and as a black-and-white mini-comic. In September, Skelly posted, ''after some big projects came and went and my style started changing, i [sic] decided to scrap what i had drawn to rewrite it and redraw it as a color comic.'' My Pretty Vampire took its bow in an 8½ X 11 European album format comic at the 2015 Small Press Expo. Later Skelly tweeted a vow to complete the next chapter by early November in time for Comic Arts Brooklyn.     

My Pretty Vampire begins and ends with a dream. One is unconscious and inert, while the other manifests as a conscious desire, an action. First dreams first. When Clover—the ''pretty'' vampire in question, a blond who sports a Bardot half undone updo—sleeps, she dreams of her past, of the frail girl in a diaphones robe as white as a winding sheet, of the girl she once was four years ago and the fanged bloodsucker she has become. Bare-chested and wearing red French cut briefs she looms over her supine self. Vampire-Clover is a sly coquette, curious, but un-tried. Corpse-Clover is dead and that's it. Dead. The larger panels to give Skelly's figures more brio and attitude, if such a thing is possible in her comics.

This image of the two Clovers foregrounds the dream's dominant colors, an oxygen-rich blood red and a pale canary yellow. Interlaced with black slashes, the image elicits a mood straight out of the wacked out cyclorama of Dario Argento's Suspiria. If you listen closely you can almost hear the nonsensical chanting of Goblin. Blood is colored black as it drips off flowers and from vampire-Clover's hair and as it pools around corpse-Clover's head. To turn the blood black is a smart choice from a shrewd storyteller because it foreshadows the narrative and speaks to Clover's standing as a character in stasis. The woman she was is dead and so is the blood. Clover is a vampire, yes, and powerful, yes, but she still feeds on the dead and not the living. Vampires are border crossers and Clover, for now, is stuck between stations. Right or wrong, Skelly's protagonists like Bon-Bon in Operation Margarine, Agent 9 and Tonya are all women of action and Clover is not, yet.

My Pretty Vampire is the first chapter in a longer story and even though it's a far too few fourteen pages, it's lithe and complete. Clover is a kept vampire, castled away by her brother Marcel who forces her to drink (black) ox blood instead of hunting on her own. Clover is impetuous, bratty and frustrated like many all Skelly's characters, ready to kick out the jams, but not sure how. Curious that Skelly is able to tap into this dissatisfaction when her art is so accomplished and never, never loses its shit cool.

Clover's room holds the trappings of her former life like stuffed toys and mirrors. In a flight of absurdism that dovetails with Skelly's love for cult classics and trash cinema, Clover wears a schoolgirl uniform, complete with pleated skirt, when she studies. The outfit and the requirement a vampire keeps up with her schoolwork is probably Marcel's doing … of course. It's on her way to her studies that she receives some contraband cigarettes and matches from the resident cook, Elsa. After all, who else? In a deft Argento-esque touch Skelly gives Elsa a semi-Romanian/Eastern accent that turns her 'v's' to 'f's' and 'w's' to 'v's.' Smokes in hand, the stage is set for the second of Clover's dreams, but in this one she's not the nocturnal wan wanderer looking for answers, she's a vampire with a pen, paper and a plan. Her fangs flank a cigarette as it burns between her lips as she writes: ''my escape.'' While not a full-on act of rebellion it's the proverbial penultimate moment before the wolves show up at the door, the stillness before the sharpest teeth sink through the softest flesh and all that blood starts to flow red, red, red.    

One of the reasons Skelly lists for redrawing My Pretty Vampire and publishing it is because, as she says, ''my style started changing.'' The style she refers to has, perhaps, more to do with her writing than her cartooning. Skelly sets herself apart as a cartoonist with her emotionally rich yet straight-forward linework and uncomplicated panels. Her style is her style and any 'change' is more in its refinement as she continues to perfect her craft. To see this 'change,' look at the entirely silent sequence of Clover swimming naked in the castle's indoor pool. The statues lining the pool's perimeter and the plumes of steam make Clover look like the undead goddess she's about to become. The colors and cartooning are some of the best work Skelly has done. The change, style-wise, comes in the inclusion of this sequence and how it informs the pacing of the story. It's languorous and makes the reader implicit in Clover's torpor and allows Skelly wink at (and indulge in) the Fonda-esque. The panel she reserves for a wafting curl of steam as it rises to meet the moon transcends as it adds mood on top of mood to an already moody and sexy sequence.

Slowing down the narrative to include a story beat like this steam bath is something Skelly began in earnest in Operation Margarine. She further develops this technique in Tonya where she uses a single panel of a tweeting bird to smash cut to the abuse Tonya has suffered, a metaphoric fracture as to the character's state of mind. The cutaway to the steam in My Pretty Vampire is more tangential, more about atmosphere, but the effect is similar in how it plays with time, develops the story and comments on the action. Skelly's character game has always been a strong. The only change in her work is in how much more muscular she has become as a storyteller.

My Pretty Vampire and Tonya are evidence of Skelly's ability to pull off deeper and deeper dives into emotional depths with the saucy self-confidence of an 'it girl.' Perhaps that's what Skelly is, an 'it girl' of indie comics—a sophisticated and expert cartoonist ready to strike.
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For all things Katie Skelly visit her Tumblr. 

Keith Silva believes the best way to watch Deathdream is with the sound turned down and Iggy Pop's Lust for Life turned all the way up! Follow @keithpmsilva

 

Peter Pan Collars Don't Lie: The Deceptive Simplicity of Operation Margarine

Cartoonist: Katie Skelly

Publisher: AdHouse Books

Katie Skelly knows her way around exploitation: what to show, who not to cover up, where to put the accents, when to be bold and how much of each. Her 2012 debut graphic novel, Nurse Nurse, was a tease in all the best ways, a goofy nitrous high of see through strips held together by a barely there narrative, but the charm, oh, the charm. Skelly’s characters possess all the pathos of Shultz’s Peanuts with the charisma of a Daniel Clowes or a James Kochalka oddball. Operation Margarine sees Skelly pin the needle to the right and give a throaty roar of a creator in full.   

The lives of bad good girl Margarine (sounds like bombazine or aubergine) and bad ass Bon-Bon have become dead ends, or worse, cul-de-sacs. Margarine is a society gal (Claudette Colbert in It Happened One Night wearing Mia Farrow’s pixie cut from Rosemary’s Baby) fresh from a recent breakout from a psych ward, Bellefrew. Bon-Bon bears the scars of too many bad relationships with other women’s men, she steals, favors black leather biker jackets and alcohol. Margarine and Bon-Bon want the same thing: escape. Their problem is neither one knows where nor what they’re escaping to.

Operation Margarine plays like Skelly’s riff on truth or dare, expect ‘dare’ is the only option. For Margarine and Bon-Bon, truth (especially the past) is a fink, painful, messy and best put in the rearview mirror. When Margarine asks Bon-Bon, "So, where you from?" the response she gets says a lot, "Marge, I have an idea. Let's skip this part. Let's just be ... new people." In other words, 'nuff said. The motorcycles they ride, the clothes they wear and cigarettes they smoke act as signifiers, these girls are bad, sure, but they’re not drawn that way; those peter pan collars don’t lie.

Skelly’s work is a study in deceptive simplicity. From her line to her writing and from her character development to her panel composition, all of it aims to exploit the reader’s expectations, to write off a lack of realism for a lack of depth. To read a Katie Skelly comic is to pay attention to small details. As austere as each panel may be each one contains all the information the reader needs and nothing less. Skelly’s neatness and orderliness is her tell. Like her characters, Skelly seems to say, ‘go on, underestimate me, I dare you.’ Like the man sez, “the sweetest kittens have the sharpest claws.”

Skelly’s art of deception comes correct in her cartooning. To maintain appearances, Margarine’s blond urchin cut offsets Bon-Bon’s black bouffant, dark and light, good and bad, a binary pair if there ever was one. This kind of black and white dichotomy gives Skelly a unique way to use and exploit her B&W comic to her full advantage. After an ambush and an octane-fueled flight from the heterochromia iridum Billy and her gang, the ‘Faces of Death,’ Margarine and Bon-Bon cool their boot heals around a campfire under a star filled desert sky.

 

In all Operation Margarine’s one-hundred-and-four pages, this is the one moment Skelly chooses to draw as a full page, a silent character study of peaceful repose. Margarine’s eyes close as she takes a drag on her cigarette. She supports herself with her left arm, her posture is open. She wears her leather jacket like a wrap, a society girl through and through. Opposite Margarine, Bon-Bon, holds her cigarette away from her body, her big eyes narrow on the campfire smoke and the stars in the sky. She sits with her legs curled up (coiled) in front of her and slings a leather clad arm around her body like a black iron bar. She looks as hospitable as a rattlesnake. Such a simple and serene image, so quiet and yet Skelly makes it thunder with heartfelt and complex emotions of these seemingly clichéd characters.

In the following page, Skelly drops the black-and-white-good-girl-bad-girl aesthetic and everything becomes a bit more … transparent. Except for two small square panels in the upper left (scorecards of who’s who), Skelly turns Margarine and Bon-Bon into blanks, outlines. Margarine, always the naïf (at this point, at least), says, “I’ve never been in the desert before.” Bon-Bon responds, “only one thing to know about it … there’s nowhere to hide.”

The combination of Bon-Bon’s words with the composition of the page and that final panel mark Skelly as a master cartoonist and storyteller. She provides all the portent and foreboding of a horror movie as she dwarfs Margarine and Bon-Bon at the bottom of the frame to make them look small in the midst of a cold, dark and uncaring universe. And then there’s the second half of Bon-Bon’s sentence -- the ‘there’s nowhere to hide’ part -- which provides an extra little turn of the screw and acts as the knockout punch to the wind up of the facing page with all its perceived serenity. Troubled and in trouble: Bon-Bon and Margarine laid bare. This is the style of delicacy, drama and dread with which Skelly operates in Operation Margarine, all of it in one (not so) simple panel. 

In Nurse Nurse and Agent 8 -- an erotic web-comic at Slutist.com -- Skelly sugars off her love of Barbarella and other trashy genre-specific kitsch to create something singular, something very Skelly. She’s less an imitator and more a genre-stylist; innovative and comfortable in the cottony familiarity of genre. Yes, Operation Margarine is about two wayward wanton women who ride motorcycles through the desert in search of satisfaction if not solace and should Skelly want to ape such exploitive fare like Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! she will, but Operation Margarine ain’t it. Still, it’s fun and to mix and Skelly sure as hell accessorizes like it’s going out of style.

As her podcast, Trash Twins, with Sarah Horrocks makes plain, Skelly is familiar with the high-brow notions of low-brow culture. Again, Skelly shows herself to be a ‘playa’ when it comes to genre tropes, exploitations of exploitations. In Operation Margarine’s inevitable showdown scene, Bon-Bon and Margarine are met by the book’s big bad, Billy, or at least her long legs.

This gunslinger stance, one lone duelist framed by the forked legs of another, is a trope in and of itself. Skelly plays off this ‘Western’ iconography, yes, but as seen through the lens of the ‘bad girls lost in the desert’ storyline and Skelly’s love for the exploitation genre, this image also riffs off of a similar showdown from Russ Meyers’s “belted, booted and buckled” masterpiece, Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!  

There are more than a few throw-down/show-downs in Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! and all of them frame up the physical assets of the three leads, especially the iconic Varla played by the even more iconic Tura Satana. When Varla and Rosie (Haji) confront the old man (Stuart Lancaster), Meyer foregrounds his lead’s backsides like twin colossi in black denim. Their prominence in the foreground squeezes the small frail handicapped hermit and his big dumb son as well as the frame itself. It’s clear who has both the upper hand and who draws the camera eye. For what it’s worth, Meyer cuts to this same shot (the exact composition) six times in less than two minutes, always heavy-handed, always the pervert.

 

Like Meyer, Skelly exploits the iconography to make it her own. The long legs and short skirt of the dangerous Billy frame the smaller and less powerful Bon-Bon and Margarine. Billy becomes a Goliath; so much so her upper body doesn’t even fit in the frame. To this point in the story Billy has only been the threat of a knife. Now Skelly pulls that knife and shows it to her heroes. Whereas Varla and Rosie were the intimidators in F,P!K!K!, Skelly subverts the subversion and makes her heroes the demure and defenseless ones. This intimidating image calls back to Bon-Bon and Margarine in the desert being crushed by an unfeeling universe except now that menace sports thigh-high black boots. A killer figure for sure. Once a knife like Billy gets pulled, someone has to die and someone has to live to tell the tale.

For all its female empowerment, Operation Margarine has balls in more ways than one. All in all, it’s a coming out party with Margarine as its débutante. She’s the object of the title and the story. But it’s the ‘operation’ or in this case, the operator, Bon-Bon, where the story and Margarine get their strength. Like her namesake, Bon-Bon has a hard shell, but she’s soft(er) on the inside. She looks out for Margarine. She is her protector, her champion and in a way, Margarine’s (re)maker and creator. Katie Skelly is a Bon-Bon. She knows to create, no matter the medium or the raw materials, means to let go. At the end of Operation Margarine Bon-Bon lets go, she has to, and so too does Skelly. Ride on, Margarine, ride on.

Operation Margarine is available from AdHouse Books or directly from Katie Skelly.