Virtual Memories Show 682:
Katie Skelly
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Subscribe: Spotify | TuneIn | RSS | More
“I was on twitter and saw someone say, ‘The Weeknd makes music for haunted strip clubs,’ and that idea is something my brain kept coming back to.”
After a 12-year Virtual Memories gap, Katie Skelly is back to celebrate her fantastic new graphic novel, HEAVEN (Fantagraphics)! But that’s not all: she’s also got the Bad Girl Tarot II (Kickstarter closing July 16, 2026), her horror comics anthology, Viscere, and the Thick Lines podcast! We talk about how she restructured her life and creativity post-lockdown, how she wound up marrying Jaime Hernandez, moving to LA, abandoning the Mets, and finding a community of cartoonists (spoiler: community is the thread that runs through Katie’s art and life), the funny tweet about The Weeknd that inspired HEAVEN, why she designed this new tarot deck to be like a prop for a movie you’d want to live in, and why she didn’t learn from my example and avoid making her own podcast. We get into how writing Ed Piskor’s obituary broke her, and the episode in Ed’s life that she takes as a cautionary note, the festival that drew her into the comics world, how she measures herself against her yearly Nabokov read, why she’s pretty much done with social media, the flight delay that led to her next comics project, and more! PLUS, Katie reads my tarot as we talk about what it’ll take for me to finish my book! Give it a listen! And go read HEAVEN!
“I started to incorporate tarot into my daily practice of life. Not in a way that restricts anything, but just in a way that gets a little bit more perspective or think about things that are just out of my control. It’s about a getting a bigger picture.”
“You have this idea in your head and you feel like you can project it out of your mind onto the wall and define exactly what it is, and you can’t! You can’t! You just have to work through it.”
“In my way, I’m going to honor Ed Piskor’s life by just being happy with everything I get: The win doesn’t matter if you don’t feel it.”
“Making an anthology was like, ‘I’m gonna outsource all my pain and get OTHER people to draw!'”
Enjoy the conversation! Then check out the archives for more great episodes!
Lots of ways to follow The Virtual Memories Show! iTunes, Spotify, BlueSky, Instagram, YouTube, Tumblr, and good ol’ RSS!
About our Guest
Katie Skelly is the author of Maids, The Agency, and My Pretty Vampire. She was born in Pennsylvania in 1985 and holds a B.A. in Art History from Syracuse University. Katie lives in Los Angeles with her husband Jaime and their two cats.
Artists in (my) residence
Here’s the tarot spread Katie laid out for my reading:
And heck, here’s the three of us, because those two are adorable:
Credits: This episode’s music is Fella by Hal Mayforth, used with permission from the artist. The conversation was recorded at the AC Hotel in Beverly Hills on a pair of Shure Beta 58A microphones feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4 digital recorder & interface. I recorded the intro and outro on a Heil PR-40 Dynamic Studio Recording Microphone feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4. All processing and editing done in Adobe Audition CC. Publicity photo of Katie by someone else; other ones by me. It’s on my instagram.