The Agency by Katie Skelly

Katie Skelly is a fun, interesting cartoonist whose work hasn't quite connected with me. I knew that from her My Pretty Vampire, but the "fun, interesting" thing got me to come back for another run.

The Agency is a 2018 book, collecting a loose series of webcomics that came out over the three previous years. It doesn't tell a single story, but there is a through-line, and - as I'm coming to think is standard for Skelly - there's a core viewpoint and style that unifies the whole thing.

(I wonder where these stories appeared, since they're quite sexy - and my sense is that the webcomics world has usually been divided into the "no nudity! we're family-friendly" world and the "all sex! all the time!" world. This isn't all sex, but it's mostly sex: there's a lot of nudity, casual and specifically sexy, and basically all of the stories have have some sexual activity, though not as central and overwhelming as it usually is in a sex webcomic. I may here be circling the fact that this is by a woman, and so it's about things that this woman found sexy and wanted to put into a comic - therefore it's not as male-gaze-y and relentlessly focused on sticking penises into things as the typical sexcomics by a man.)

Skelly doesn't tell us what "the agency" is. But her main characters are all women, all introduced as "Agent <number>" starting with 8 and running up, sometimes jumping numbers. They have sexy adventures in which they explore things, are glamorous, and have vaguely portentous dialogues. They are in vaguely genre-fiction settings that don't entirely cohere together: a Barbarella-ish spacewoman, a model, a spy - maybe several model/spies. As I'm thinking is usual for Skelly, there's a '60s movie vibe, in the situations and the costumes and hair and the bright vibrant overlays of color.

These are sex stories, but generally positive ones. These women are getting sex they want, with themselves or other people or odder things (vibrating alien flora? octopuses!). The agents tend to disappear suddenly, as Skelly's attention shifts for the next story - they're signposts rather than people, characters who can be in the next situation for the next sexy idea. But they're mostly happy, and all self-motivated - they're doing what they want, getting mostly what they want, and enjoying themselves.

Again, there's no overall story. Each piece is basically separate, like we're watching some sexy short-film festival from 1968, far more woman-focused and sex-positive than would have been likely at the time. Their stories are vibrant and visually interesting - Skelly has a flat style, with quick lines and big eyes and ruled panel borders under those big slabs of glorious color - at times psychedelic, always distinctive.