Heaven
Cartoonist: Katie Skelly
Publisher: Fantagraphics
Publication Date: July 2026
In simplest terms, cartoonist Katie Skelly’s new book Heaven is about an adrift young woman, Dolly, who becomes intrigued by a strip club on the edge of town and ultimately goes to work there. But from this simple premise, Skelly expertly incorporates touches of the fantastic and unreal, using surreality, mild erotica, and folk horror to exaggerate the already-big feelings driving her young protagonist. And what results is a stunner of a coming-of-age graphic novel, one that reads like a speeding car on a sun-drenched highway that those inside won’t soon forget.
Indeed, Heaven is Skelly’s first new full-length graphic novel since 2020’s Maids (which I reviewed for my now-defunct website), and it occupies arguably a similar territory, or at least it seems to have some of the same underlying fascinations at heart. But whereas Maids was firmly rooted in reality, Heaven sees Skelly moving into almost ethereal territory. Maids followed the (true) story of young women and an entanglement with the macabre, drawing a line from abuse to hyper-violent retribution, contrasted against Skelly’s spare-but-stylish aesthetic.
And I think Heaven pushes that aesthetic — and by extension its eventual contrast with some of this book’s relatively light gore — even further right from its start. The book opens with a three-page sequence to establish that yes, there will be monsters and darkness. A patron at a strip club lies before the stage, neither his face nor the above dancers’ faces in panel, as dollars spill down onto him, and off we go with two more pages that make it clear that Heaven is a strip club of the macabre.
That tease is a nice, if direct, way to foreshadow what the book intends to deal with, the touches of horror, as we segue into our coming-of-age tale. And I found it all engrossing, both the tease and the more grounded story about the young woman. The protagonist, Dolly, is a strong searching teen character, with a fun group of friends around her, cut from classic molds of angsty adolescent ennui. They know the legend of the strip club Heaven, located on the outskirts of their town, and legend has it it’s hard to find, that it might even move around.
These choices do such an effective job of capturing the feeling of yearning for adulthood, which at that age feels at once both enticing and elusive, and maybe even dangerous, with choices you make at the juncture liable to define the rest of your life. You have long heard about adulthood, but how do you find it? And are you making the right choice by speeding into its grasps? Or should you pump the breaks and seek more comfort in the familiar?
I also quite enjoyed that a lot of the genre horror touches Skelly deftly works into Heaven feel understated. It’s partially an affect of her cartooning, but the spareness of the blood and monster imagery here serves the plot well, because really the vampiric bloody business is more of a trapping than it is this story’s center. The erotica in this book functions similarly, all done tastefully to very much serve the protagonist and her journey.
But what I liked most about Heaven, I think, is that it feels from the start like a story that could only come from Skelly, who has established a clear set of themes and interests to explore within her growing and coherent boy of work, as well as the compelling visual language that is at her disposal. Heaven clocks in at a svelte 100 pages, and that’s perfect, because it will almost certainly leave you anxious for more.
Heaven is available now via Fantagraphics
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