A liminal strip club appears on the highway, and nothing stays the same

Anyone looking for a standard, localized coming-of-age story or a predictable underground thriller will be caught completely off guard by Katie Skelly’s Heaven. The comic, out now via Fantagraphics, operates like a deceptive trap: it introduces us to the mundane, painful realities of late-adolescent domesticity only to radically reset its coordinates, plunging headfirst into a black hole of cosmic horror and psychological submission. And yet, upon closer inspection, an invisible, visceral thread connects Dolly’s initial sense of isolation with the multi-eyed entity waiting for her in the dark.

The gravitational center of this five-scene narrative is Dolly (Dolores), an 18-year-old former gymnast whose world is shrinking by the minute. Her parents are divorcing, her family’s financial status is in free fall, and her social life is reduced to passive car rides with schoolmates who treat her age as a mere utility to bypass legal barriers. Dolly is pushed by a quiet, suffocating desperation.

The turning point occurs when she encounters “Heaven,” a liminal strip club that exists on the outer edges of reality, appearing and vanishing from the highway like a malignant mirage. To secure her place inside this anomaly, Dolly undergoes a harrowing initiation.

Skelly’s visual language thrives on sharp contrasts and a calculated, retro-pop aesthetic. Drawing from the clean lines of 1970s manga and a bold, flat color palette dominated by bleeding pinks, and deep reds, Heaven establishes an atmosphere that feels simultaneously inviting and profoundly toxic. This graphic style turns the narrative’s inherent violence into a hallucinatory, magnetic trip.

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