Heaven

Reviews Tate McFadden | August 3, 2026 Heaven, which is Skelly’s most conceptually ambitious book yet, follows 18-year-old high schooler Dolly, who decides to join a mysterious strip club located in the desert called Heaven. Dolly uses her skills as a former gymnast to score a dance job, and begins to discover a tentative found family with the other dancers, growing more distant from her parents and school friends in turn. At the same time, she and her friends seek out the mystery at the heart of the club as men go in but never come out, and the club manager consorts with strange beings from another world. Heaven is a story about sex work, adolescence, and eldritch horrors. Skelly has been examining the abjectness of girl- and womanhood in her work for almost a decade. Her art is always minimalistic and simple, bordering on cute, but her subject matters are often as off-putting as they are tempting. The dual nature of the medium, where the text says one thing while the image say another, makes comics ripe for such contradictions in terms. Like all of Skelly’s projects to date, Heaven is short and sweet, more a graphic novella than a novel. The length, however, doesn’t mitigate the ...