Tommy and Eva aren’t the pair you’d expect: he’s a down on his luck Los Angeles PI and she’s a flapper ghost who is helping him out. When they get a case that takes them to the Magic Manor to bring a runaway home, they wind up with more than they bargained for in Dame from the Dark, a TKO Short, written by Rob Plinkington, with art by Kit Mills and letters by Ariana Maher.
Short stories can be tricky. When you have a novel or a series, you can introduce characters and to set tone at a leisurely pace. But when you only have seventeen pages, you have to work very fast to make a story feel like it’s complete, and not leaning either towards too much exposition or towards so little the world feels shallow. Dame from the Dark, part of TKO Studios “TKO Shorts” program, does a great job of hitting many of the points it needs to make it a satisfying read.
It’s important to understand that this isn’t a mystery. P.I. stories are often mysteries, but this one is something else entirely. Our protagonists have been hired to get Nico, a runaway, to come home. She’s currently working as a magician’s assistant to Le Samson Fantastique, a magician whose French accent is so fake it would make sometime X-Men ally Fantomex think that Samson was taking this a bit far who is appearing at the Magic Manor, a high end magician’s club that is a thinly veiled analogue to L.A.’s famous Magic Castle. Since the story is a recovery rather than a whodunnit, it doesn’t have to deal with all the heavy lifting of a mystery, all the hints and clues that have to pay off, which allows for more characterization, which is where the book shines.
This story rests solidly on the banter and relationship between our two leads, Tommy and Eva. Tommy is a PI who might not be very good at his job, and Eva is a ghost of a classic Hollywood era starlet who was murdered. It’s an odd couple to be sure, and that really helps establish the world; their banter is a handy way to deliver exposition without it feeling like exposition. You immediately know not just what they do, but who they are: he’s a guy from Boston who wasn’t doing too well in L.A. until Eva came along, and she’s a witty woman of a bygone age who wants more than just haunting.
The story hints at so much more than what is right on the page, which is important in an establishing story. We see that Tommy tries to be cynical and harsh, but only slight prodding from Eva exposes that he is softer at heart than he’d admit. And a moment of Tommy’s frustration reveals a bit about Eva’s past (and death), which is a tantalizing hint of the wider world of the story.
The actual plot of the book is fairly paint-by-numbers. Detectives sneak into place to find the person they’re looking for. Person doesn’t want to go, or maybe does. Person’s significant other turns out to be abusive jerk. Ghost and detective put the fear of ghost into him, and client decides to leave. If you’re familiar with the tropes of the PI genre, it’s not new, but it is handled well, and as stated, with only seventeen pages, it might be better to lean into tropes to allow for other aspects of a story to shine, like character and atmosphere.
Speaking of atmosphere, Kit Mills’ art absolutely sets a tone in this comic. The story does a good job of balancing comedy, drama and horror, and Mills shepherds that balancing act. When a comic can see one of its leads fumbling magic tricks out of coat pockets just two pages after the other turned into a giant floating ghost with fangs, and they are both well rendered and feel suited to the world, you know the artist is doing something right. Whether it’s sitting at the bar at the Magic Manor and bantering, arguing over the value of the case or having an end of case heart-to-heart, the art really helps establish the relationship between the leads, which so much of the writing is dedicated to.
While the cover of the short only says Dame from the Dark, the title inside the comic is “Fast Times at Magic Manor!: A Dame from the Dark Mystery.” This seems to hint that there quill be more tales of Tommy and Eva coming, and if this short is any indication, I’ll be coming back when they do.
Matt Lazorwitz read his first comic at the age of five. It was Who's Who in the DC Universe #2, featuring characters whose names begin with B, which explains so much about his Batman obsession. He writes about comics he loves, and co-hosts the creator interview podcast WMQ&A with Dan Grote.
