Pop Culture Pleasure

Katie Skelly's comics are flat, and her first book with independent publishing giant Fantagraphics, My Pretty Vampire, is no exception. Swaths of bold, primary colors—unbroken by patterns or shading or anything else that might lend them depth or density—make each panel register as a searing exclamation. Little language (indeed, the first five pages are utterly silent) moves us: Skelly's word balloons come in four and five shot phrases. And the characters themselves—a rich, sometimes bratty schoolgirl vampire, Clover, her domineering older brother, Marcel, and private eye resplendent with upturned collar, cigarette, and eye-patch, John—are stylish archetypes of the kind of bad 1970s B-movies Skelly worships. If My Pretty Vampire offends because it doesn't look, smell, taste, or sound like the glut of graphic memoirs that populate the graphic novel shelf at Barnes and Noble, well, then your senses just aren't tuned to the right frequency.

Like a lot of cartoonists of the millennial generation, Skelly has kept up a steady flow of high-quality comics as she became a fixture at American comics conventions over the past several years. An intergalactic, sexy space romp, Nurse Nurse (2012) and her bad gal motorcycle road trip, Operation Margarine (2014), earned her the Emerging Artist award at the inaugural Cartoon Crossroads Columbus (CXC) comics convention in 2015. You can also indulge in her playful comic erotica, which she's serialized across the web, in her minicomic Agent and recently collected in The Agency (2018). You might see your future in the cards with her Bad Girl Tarot Deck, for which she recently ran a very successful Kickstarter campaign to the tune of about $12,000 in backers. And you can still access the audio archives of Trash Twins, a podcast in which Skelly and fellow cartoonist Sarah Horrocks dig through their favorite pop culture detritus: from 1970s sexploitation films to 1980s anime, Valley of the Dolls (1967), The Anna Nicole Show, Resident Evil (2002), and campy fave space babe from the forty-first century, Barbarella (1968).

All of which is to say, if the panels of Skelly's My Pretty Vampire appear overly simplistic, the dialogue contrived, her plot formulaic (well, until the third act), that is, in part, the point. Or, rather, the pleasure. And My Pretty Vampire, like all of Skelly's work, is about pleasure. Pulled from a lush nightmare that seems to recall protagonist Clover's transformation from human to vampire, the first act finds Clover in the gothic mansion in which her brother, Marcel, has imprisoned her for four years. Clover's life inside the mansion may seem charmed—lavish breakfasts, swimming nude in an indoor pool adorned with statues of Greek goddesses like Diana, and bartering smokes off the maid, Elsa. What Clover truly desires, however, is not the ox blood her brother placates her with, but the real thing: human flesh and blood. Over starving because her brother can't hang, Clover plots her escape in her diary and swiftly finds herself on the road, driven by her own desires and, like any self-respecting vampire, her bloodlust.

Even as incredibly stylish bodies pile up in Clover's wake, it becomes clear that Skelly's vampiress isn't on a murderous rampage but merely learning her pleasures—for sex, drugs, and yes, blood. As the comic enters its third act, Clover wanders into the ruins of a party and is plied with drugs as a nameless girl asks to try her dress. "I feel the twitch rising in me… worse than ever," Clover admits as the girl begins to make out with her. "I'm starting to feel myself disappear…" Skelly's panels trip out, cutting from steamy kiss to a surreal x-ray of Clover's skeleton beneath her signature blonde coif, pockmarked with pop-art bursts of pink, magenta and white—that is, until the fangs come out and Clover bites her new paramour, taking a chunk out of her chin before finding, at last, her neck.There's...