Review by Ian Keogh

There’s a consistent playfulness about Katie Skelly’s output, and that extends to her spotlighting a strip club that isn’t all it seems. It’s alluring to eighteen year old Dolly as a means of making the money her family lacks, and her new schoolfriends are curious enough about Heaven themselves to help her audition, although only Dolly has the courage to venture inside.

Heaven at first seems set to develop into a wish-fulfilment satire about unacceptable male behaviour, hinting at a grindcore movie in comics form, with the club a fly trap for entitled creeps, yet it never moves properly into an action scene. Coy hints, whimsy and mysterious answers substitute. Skelly sets an atmosphere via strangeness, readers directed to notice what Dolly doesn’t, while the fears of her friends in the face of her indifference also raises concern. Narrative decompression is the format of choice, though, and the mystery and suspense isn’t enough to sustain even an exceedingly slim story.

In other circumstances noteworthy art could disguise the lack of plot, but Skelly’s style is deliberate naive simplicity. Each individual panel could be framed as a talking piece, but when combined they’re functional without being attractive. Her art is best when moving into the abstractions of shapes.

It’s been a fair time since Maids, Skelly’s previous graphic novel, which progressed from her earlier work, yet Heaven returns to previously explored themes adding nothing to them. There seems contentment in exploring a very narrow range of ideas, when the expectation this far into Skelly’s career might have been some broadening into other areas.

The final page returns to Dolly’s school assignments, showing a page marked C+ with a comment congratulating her on applying herself. It could be Skelly marking her own homework.