Catching up with Katie Skelly: The Agency and Maids

Though Skelly's character design and rendering doesn't vary much from story to story, everything else about them may, from the use of color, the style with which it is applied and the layouts. And though the content may vary widely from a sort of Barbarella-esque space vixen engaged in space exploration to the cryptic antics of a fashion model in a Lynchian adventure to a story of a strange cult to a tale of spies, they all star sexy young women who often find themselves engaged in various sex acts.

The stories are all light and fun, a few having a sense of the weird or mysterious about them while others are more outright humorous.

The conceit is never explicitly explained within the book, but each heroine is apparently a different "agent" and designated by a number.

The first of these is Agent 8, the aforementioned space girl. When we first meet her, she is staring at the stars, and asks, "Is there more life out there?" In the next panel, an animated skeleton character is incredulous: "What? You know that there is! We met on Jupiter?!" (In perhaps Skelly's funniest strip, a black-and-white one-pager, she and the skeleton, who named Hamilton, have apparently just landed and started exploring a new planet. He mentions the interesting plant life, which is vaguely phallic, only to turn and find that 8 has already stripped naked, laid down and apparently put one inside herself.)

Among Agent 8's longer stories, she meets a fan of hers at a "weird party" (there is a deer in the foreground) who is also a seamstress, and offers to make her a custom dress, and they end up having sex. And then there's one where she meets Spider-Man, of all people. (Or, at least, someone wearing a Spider-Man costume.) Definitely the web-slinger's most unexpected guest appearance in a comic book.

Then there's Agent 9, whose story I discussed previously in the previously linked-to column. It's the brightest colored of all the stories within, and one that is fully colored (Many of the Agent 8 stories, by contrast, have limited palettes of a color or two).

Agent 10 stars in a more complex story. Snippets of news reports suggest she is a famous actress in a high-profile but dissolving marriage, who has fallen in with a cult run by a mysterious woman in a wheelchair. They talk of a ritual, in which 10 is stripped and hung from shackles while an octopus slithers from its pot and crawls all over her, after which she is apparently granted visions. She then has a heart to heart (and sex) with a beautiful transgirl wearing a leather jacket in a pool.

Somewhere in a jungle compound, a blond woman who looks like some kind of spy movie villain (eye patch and cape, an injured leg in a wire contraption and a cane) seems to be giving dictation to another woman. This is Dr. Paracletus, and she is the target of Agent 73, who appears with a beret on her head and a gun in her hand. The two have history, and though there's plenty of exposition, it is cryptic; it would seem that 73's ex-lover Bertrand had transitioned into a woman named Rosalind, and the doctor has used her surgical skills to give Rosalind Agent 73's own face...?

I referred to the late David Lynch a couple of paragraphs ago, and, indeed, the back half of the book does have that sort of never-explained, just-suggested sense of something bigger, more mysterious and darker just under the surface that permeates some of the filmmaker's best-known works, as he would use the feelings of certain types of genre films to give his own work a tone, without similarly importing plot points or other genre signifiers. (The result? His fans liked the ways his films felt to them, while those who didn't care for his work might often dismiss it as weird or confusing).

I suppose a better point of reference might be the work of the late Richard Sala (particularly given Skelly's publisher here), who, similar to Lynch, would take notes from different genre works to imbue his comics with a sense of the mysterious or suggestions of conspiracies that are never entirely delineated. (And, of course, Sala was, like Skelly, able to create highly charged sexual characters, despite how far his particular style was from what we might call "realistic").

That's only really true for about half of the stories in The Agency, though, the ones starring Agents 9, 10 and 73. As for Agent 8, her adventures are more straightforward (One is a simple, silent three-pager in which she lolls about naked in a field of phallic mushrooms, licking them before pulling the caps off of a pair of them, riding one while fellating another, until she's apparently sexually satisfied and thoroughly tripping). 

Though obviously not as narratively satisfying as some of Skelly's longer previous works, The Agency is an excellent showcase for her art, it offers a compelling example of her engaging with various subjects and it manages to be erotic without being exploitative, sexy and sexual while wholly hers. 

To use a musical metaphor, it's more jazz than concept album. To use one from prose, it's a collection of short stories rather than a literary novel. For fans of Skelly's, it's a must-read, and for those looking for a place to start with her body of work, it's an easy entry point. 

Although one need not know of the case and its long afterlife in culture—I surely didn't—to follow Skelly's telling, or to experience a sense of expectant dread over its inevitable violence while reading. The book opens, after all, with a panel of a bloody eyeball, which a woman in a maid's uniform walks towards and picks up off the floor, holds in her hand, and then points towards with a finger, as if she's about to poke it...before the scene transitions to that same finger pushing a doorbell.

The woman in the scene is Lea, the younger sister of Christine, who has been employed by Madame Lancelin as a maid for several years. Christine has prevailed upon Madame Lancelin to take in and employ her sister as well. 

Their life as maids, which spans a few years before the climax, is hard, as they work very long hours cleaning a big house and preparing meals. Madame isn't the kindest boss, either, as she slaps Christine in one panel, and is demanding of the sisters—especially so after Lea is hired, since, as she explains, if she's paying for two maids, she wants twice the work done, rather than paying for Christine to simply have a companion while she works.

The girls' life wasn't particularly easy before either, though. Flashbacks imply that the girls grew up with an alcoholic, presumably abusive mother, and later served in a convent. After Christine left the convent, Lea apparently had a hard time, refusing to do her chores or pray, and there's a scene where she is kicked out of the convent (Whether or not this has to do with her cutting the head off of a pet songbird with a pair of scissors isn't made explicit; luckily, Skelly doesn't draw the act itself, just the moment before and then, later, the result. It's still pretty flinchy).

While Christine copes with the pressures of her maid job by smoking and stealing little items from the family—which Madame seems to be aware of, and to reluctantly tolerate—the more sensitive Lea eventually has a breakdown of sorts, running out to the woods to vomit after feeling sick. 

Things come to a head one night after Lea's red right hand starts talking to her, in a reddish pink dialogue balloon full of comforting words. After they accidentally blow a fuse and Madame yells at them, threatening to throw them both out, Christine puts Madame's eyes out, and then attacks her with an iron. At this point, the sisters both talk in pink-colored dialogue balloons, saying the same things simultaneously, like "She's next" (referring to Madame's daughter) and "I knew you could do it." 

There's at least a suggestion of the supernatural, or that the sisters are somewhat insane, acting out not because of the fact that they had been pushed too far or in retaliation for abuse and exploitation, but more so because they were, well, murderers. (As with the bird earlier in the narrative, the violence of the murders is staged fairly tastefully, with the actual acts left to the imagination, so that we see, say, Christine raising the iron over her head, and then the action cuts to the daughter reacting to her mother's scream from another room entirely, the iron actually striking the victim off-panel).

Given my own unfamiliarity with the case, I'm not the best person to comment on how Skelly portrays its specifics here, though. There are implications throughout the book, but Skelly's telling is one of impressions and feelings, with elements of the story left purposefully cryptic and mysterious, so the readers can interpret it as they wish.

All of the swirling dark content and violent actions of the climax are somewhat in contrast with Skelly's own simple, intimate art style, which, as with the sex in The Agency discussed above, keeps the work from feeling exploitative.