Created by Dave Ebersole and Delia Gable
Maybe Ricky Nelson was right–you can’t please everyone. But theatre director and playwright Dave Ebersole and illustrator Delia Gable certainly gave it a good shot, with the creation of Dash, a comic book series put out by tiny Northwest Press, featuring DASHELL “DASH” MALONE, a gay private eye in 1940s Los Angeles going up against assorted supernatural horrors.
So, right off the bat, before you can even say Steve Niles, you have fans of pulp, noir, nostalgia, private eyes and gay detectives all perking up. And Ebersole and Gable don’t miss a trick: there’s Cindy Crenshaw (Dash’s wisecracking secretary, Johnny (his hunky sometime boyfriend, who has a hell of a secret all his own), Zita Makara (a sexy femme fatale with an exotic minicker), a bunch of corrupt (and homophobic) cops, a slew of racy double entendres (and several single ones), and a killer mummy threatening to destroy Los Angeles. And of course Dash himself, a suitably hard-boiled private eye who’s openly gay in 1940s Los Angeles. Now that’s tough.
When it first came out, Northwest billed it as a “supernatural noir” where “The Maltese Falcon meets The Mummy meets Raiders of the Lost Ark” (see what I mean about them covering all the bases?). Unfortunately, the book–intended to be monthly–struggled, only coming out in sporadic bursts over the course of a few years, though a super-duper collection rounding up the first six issues and containing new material, The Case of the Mysterious Zita Makara, is slotted for release in 2020.
COMICS
- DASH
(2014-20, Northwest Press)
6 issues
Written by Dave Ebersole
Art by Delia Gable, Vinnie Rico
GRAPHIC NOVELS & COLLECTIONS
- THE CASE OF THE MYSTERIOUS ZITA MAKARA | Buy the comic
(2020, Northwest Press)
Collects all six issues of the series, with 40 pages of new material and an introduction by Steve Orlando.
