Visiting Artist: Katie Skelly

Katie Skelly told a hard-hitting tale of smart work. She is the creator of Nurse Nurse and Operation Margerine and has more comics already in the works. She creates the Agent series for a sex-positive feminist group, which is now on Agent 10. And she is currently self-publishing My Pretty Vampire, a gorgeous color comic exploring her interest in vampire B-movies.

Katie Skelly next to her name board, drawn by Luke Howard.

She started Nurse Nurse while going to grad school for art history but realized she wanted to focus on comics. Barbarella, an over-the-top sci-fi movie from the 60s that makes use of smoke instead of fancy settings, inspired Nurse Nurse. Katie realized you don’t need to be able to draw a background like Moebius to create an engaging sci-fi story. From the comics, she learned how to use vague psychedelic space in lieu of specific landscapes.

Katie, what a pro.

Katie was her own marketer, as most self-publishers are, and so sent Nurse Nurse out for reviews and got it into the comic stores she knew of in New York. Dylan of Sparkplug saw it and asked to publish it. It was the first book that Sparkplug published without Dylan.

Katie signing books for (left to right): Michelle Ollie, Dean Sudarsky (’16), Jacob Bousseirre (’17), Kane Lynch (’16), and Kotaline Jones (’16).

With Nurse Nurse, Katie got the hippy dippy vibe out of her system and examined what she enjoyed in that story. It was Bandit, the tough space pirate. And she thought, what do I think looks cool: Kate Moss and motorcycle jackets. So she bought herself a motorcycle jacket and loved it. And she began watching old movies. Four months after Nurse Nurse was released, Katie began work on Operation Margerine. The character BonBon was based on how Katie was dressing at the time. And Margerine was based partly on Mia Farrow in Rosemary’s Baby, the properness. She had grown since working on Nurse Nurse and began to use pauses in her stories like the directors did in the movies she loved.

Sometimes visiting artists have too much fun giving their talk.

Since the completion of Operation Margerine with AdHouse, Katie has begun work on My Pretty Vampire. She had been working on web comics and decided to try color because it is free to publish color online, a barrier to her exploring color work in her print books in the past. But with My Pretty Vampire and color experience under her belt, she is working even more with color. She is inspired by palletes like those by Peellaert in The Adventures of Jodelle. Peelaert makes great use of white as a color, and Katie wanted to explore that.

We were lucky enough to be able to buy books directly from Katie.

Katie’s style is fairly minimalistic partly because she is trying to save time, and partly because she prefers the look. Minimalistic makes the work more accessible and easier to read. She works a full-time job, plus a long commute, so when that is compared with the massive amount of work she has put out in the last 3 years, it is quite impressive.

Katie’s favorite book in the Schulz Library is Ayako by Osamu Tezuka.

Photos courtesy of Abe Olson.