By Rob Pilkington and Kit Mills — Writer Rob Pilkington and Artist Kit Mills join Comics Anatomy today to share their process for creating Dame from the Dark, laying out the steps for showcasing how ghosts work in the world of their story. Dame from the Dark is available from TKO Studios and via Comixology.

ROB PILKINGTON: So, it turns out a comic about an unlikely partnership between a small-time crook and the spirit of a Golden Age starlet (a spirit who only the crook can see) is easier to pitch than to actually, uh, execute. People know ghost stories, so as soon as you put a ghost in your thing, you need to clue them in to what your particular brand of ghost can and can't do. 

That can be a lot to juggle in any ghost story and is even more to juggle in just 17 pages—which is what we endeavored to do with Dame from the Dark, our short from TKO Studios.

From a writing standpoint, I was very lucky to receive a bunch of great input on these finer paranormal points from our editor Sebastian Girner. And even before TKO, Kit and I had made a number of “ghost” decisions that we thought would ward off certain storytelling pitfalls.

KIT MILLS: How does one illustrate a ghost? I guess that depends on what kind of ghost she is. Despite having been dead for more than ninety years, Eva is a vibrant character with a load of charisma and stage presence. A lot of that comes from her dialogue, but I also wanted to make sure that the reader can see it in her character design and the way that she’s presented on the page.

KIT: We tend to think of and depict ghosts as transparent phantoms, but I think in a two-dimensional medium that approach would just make Eva fade into the background. She belongs in the spotlight! In the end, I decided to modify her initial, more ethereal character design a little bit, fully rendering her in opaque shades of grey to make her look like the film star of the 1930s she never got to be, wearing the outfit she wore when she died.

Our Opening Scene

ROB: One of the things we knew we wanted to do was do a page-turn reveal of Eva in a place that the reader was already looking to really drive home her invisibility. We did a similar gag in the original pitch pages for Dame, so this was a chance to fine tune it.

On the writing side, that meant showing Eva’s side of the conversation before she’s visible to us. It’s a bit of risk, I suppose, to open a story with some confusion for the reader: “Wait, who is this guy talking to?” But it’s so momentary (one page) and helped along with letterer Ariana Maher’s great, gothy design on Eva’s disembodied balloons, I sorta love how it works. Immediately, we know there’s more to this scenario than meets the eye.

KIT: Right, I think to some extent the reader expects to be a little disoriented on the first page or two of a new comic while they get their bearings and figure out where the story is dropping them. But the visually perceptive among them will notice the goth word balloons and figure out that something is up.

KIT: And right here, at least a little bit of confusion clears up! The disembodied word balloons belong to Eva, and perfectly match her newly-revealed aesthetic. I wanted her to feel fully present in the scenes in which we can see her. In the second panel, when we shift the camera’s focus to the judgmental old lady from the bar, the silhouetted background only reveals Tommy’s outline, leaving him raising a toast to the empty air, which helps enforce the rule that only he can see her.

Also, I love the play on “spirits!” Feels like a joke from a wry screwball comedy from the 1930s. 

ROB: Thanks! I also wanted Eva’s comment on the cocktail “not having aged a day” in 90 years to be a nod to her own ethereal, timeless state. Obviously, her vintage outfit drives that home, but I wanted her first “on-camera” line to play along with the reveal.

And speaking of her appearance, yeah, what a debut image here. A few reviewers have pointed out how Eva’s seemingly “glowing” like a silver screen projection in this story and it’s really true. The black and white just pops in every environment. From this page on, we immediately get that she’s unstuck from time and exists in a different material state from the rest of the story.

ROB: I think it was Sebastian who wanted to make sure Eva pulls some kinda spooky prank here in our first scene, something that speaks to her supernatural abilities and how they might be useful later in the story. In my head canon, Eva’s “resting” state is invisible, but it’s pretty low effort for her to appear to others on reflective surfaces.

And Kit, one of my favorite panels in this thing is Eva’s wink in the wine glass.

KIT: Yeah, I like the idea of playing with perception through mirrors and reflections here. It’s like an inversion of the lore about vampires casting no reflections. I’m sure Eva would love to dive directly into a glass of wine! She hasn’t had one since 1932.

Finding the Feet

ROB: One of my favorite pages, right here. I love the upside down panel. I remember this “ghost power” moment was one of the last things we figured out. I sorta panicked when I realized that I’d written this apparating moment for Eva—where she vanishes from Tommy’s side to another, unseen area of the venue—but during layouts, we pulled the camera away from Tommy and Eva in the fourth panel and it hadn’t occurred to me that we might’ve trampled that  teleportation moment until Kit was doing colors. 

I emailed Kit like “Oh-no! How are we going to show she’s fading away from Tommy’s side if she’s way in the background?!” And he was like “Oh yeah, that’s easy.” And that’s how we got that little, vapory “voosh” moment. It’s so good!

KIT: This was the first page that I colored, so here is where the comic really started coming to life on my end! A surprising amount of visual storytelling in comics comes through in the coloring state—it’s where all the mood variations and a lot of the sensory details are established. I think the sharp overhead lighting contrasting with the cool dimness of the space helps orient the reader here in the dark backstage, and then in the fourth panel we move the camera onstage but keep that blue sliver of the backstage view.

Actually, I think it was even easier to show Eva’s teleportation with her and Tommy in the background of panel four than if we’d kept the camera close on them. They’re far away and so I just simplified their figures to silhouettes, and the contrast between Tommy’s dark shape and Eva’s glowing transparency is very apparent! The little “voosh” that Ariana added is a delightful little bit of SFX, too.

KIT: Right here, Rob gives us one of our few direct allusions to the “rules” of ghost perception—Eva can make herself visible or not at will, but she can’t affect the visibility of a non-dead human, even though Tommy would desperately like to be invisible at this moment. Honestly, a rolling box with feet squeakily pushing itself through the bar would also be cause for confusion.

Rob: Ha, right. I knew we needed a specific call-out for the invisibility thing at some point, so I figured I’d pair it with a moment where a mortified Tommy would also want to be invisible. This page is so great—Tommy wheeling the feet with Eva sitting on the box was one of the first images I thought of for this “Magic Manor” story.

And Kit, you drew such a knockout party crowd scene in another short comic we worked on together that I wanted to sort of emulate that a bit on this page. You’re so good at creating absorbing little sartorial details and mid-moment gestures in people. This is probably my pandemic brain talking, but it’s fun to zero in on a few of these bar-goers and wonder how their evening’s going. Sigh… remember evenings?

It’s a Long(er) Story

ROB: When we were first bouncing around ideas for DAME as a short comic, Sebastian was pretty adamant that we have a moment that nodded to some of the larger backstories Eva and Tommy had in our initial pitch to TKO. I was skeptical at first, but gave it a shot with pages 10 and 11 here and it turned out to be one of the most mentioned moments in the whole piece—mostly because of what Kit does on the following page.

On this page, though, we learn more about our duo’s partnership, their frustrations, and how it all tees Eva up for her next supernatural stunt…

KIT: One of the coolest things about comics (and visual media in general, but I think it’s particularly present in comics) is that in moments of emotional turbulence you can make the panel or the whole scene look fraught and expressive to push the emotional resonance. Of course, Eva is helping the effect along here by doing some sort of ghostly manipulation of Tommy’s perception to make things go dark and scary, but it’s the same principle. Comic art: sort of like having supernatural powers.

KIT: My favorite comment from our editor, Sebastian, on the earlier drafts of this page was, “NEEDS MORE BLOOD.” He was right.

This page was a weird one, and definitely the least grounded in real space. At first, we just transported Tommy into the crime scene by tossing him on the (blood-soaked) bed of the hotel room, but then turned the bed into a giant newspaper in order to give a little more context about Eva’s murder back in 1932. In retrospect, this page sort of reminds me of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and other German Expressionist films from the 1920s, with distorted settings and surreal juxtapositions of spaces and objects disorienting both the protagonist and the viewer, making us doubt whether we are operating in real life or in a dream space. And then, just like that, we “wake up” and are right back in the alleyway on firm concrete, back in reality but shaken up by what we’ve seen in another dimension. 

ROB: Yeah, this is a standout page for obvious reasons. I remember at first being concerned that the newspaper was too abstract or silly, but now I love it. To jump on the “ghostly manipulation” Kit mentioned, yeah, this moment was written to be in-step with the tradition of “visions” in ghost stories. Like when Naomi Watts suddenly “sees” Samara’s murder at the bottom of the well in The Ring, this is basically our version of that.

Oh, also—in the final panel—I love Eva deciding that she’s going to make some kind of appearance back inside the venue and cracking her knuckles, limbering up before doing so. Again, in my head canon, Tommy is the only person who can see Eva “at rest,” but mustering scares that the general public can see is a kind of athletic, metaphysical feat for Eva.

Eva’s Big Scare

ROB: So here we have our villain, magician “Le Samson Fantastique,” back in his dressing room, being a real nice guy.

KIT: Yeah, this dude is a real drag. Rob’s dialogue in the first panel here about the “VapeBae Leisure and Lifestyle Products” sponsorship concerns cracked me up, though. Samson’s character design was truly an awful joy to work on—figuring out the best way to make him ooze contemporary sleaze (but also a fair amount of charisma!) was a fun challenge. Man-bun, appropriative “tribal” tattoos, beaded amulet necklace, general “dirtbag influencer” vibe.

ROB: Even before we had mapped out earlier Eva moments and powers, I wanted a dressing room scare in a vanity mirror to be the big Eva-flexing-some-muscle story beat—so I knew that our magician villain had to be the sort of character who’d get nose-to-nose with their own reflection. I sorta worked backwards on Samson’s character from there.

KIT: Up until the murder scene on page 11, Eva was a charming, personable phantom acting as the foil to Tommy and his hangdog grouchiness. And then suddenly she pushes us into a nightmare! Our perception of her shifts, and we ride that new understanding right into another nightmare. She becomes monstrous but still recognizable, bared fangs and distended claw-fingers offset by her 1930s bob and jaunty little hat. I put her inside a maelstrom of ink smudges, like she’s just risen up from the depths of hell in order to taunt this jerk. Ariana gives a dramatic touch to her speech bubble here as well, which makes me think that if this were a movie her voice would be deep, dark, and full of infernal reverb.

ROB: Totally, and this is the wine glass gag from page 3 on steroids. We get the reflection bit in the dressing room mirror but with a bigger, scarier payoff. It was so super smart of us (under Sebastian’s guidance) to seed that reflection bit in the first scene, so by the time this happens, we feel like it’s a logical extension of what Eva is capable of… logical at least in a ghost story sorta way.

Wrapping It Up

ROB: Looking back on what we did to communicate the “ghost rules” in DAME, I think we made some pretty on-point choices. Again, Sebastian and Ariana both made some critical contributions here that I’m so grateful for. Collectively, I think we fold in the fantasy rules of it all pretty well while keeping the characters front-and-center and the plot moving.

KIT: Yeah! For me, a lot of the aesthetic choices I make while actually in the process of drawing a comic often feel sort of arbitrary in the moment, but when I look back on everything after the fact, there’s always an obvious storytelling logic in there, and a reason why I made things the way I did. Unconscious forces are powerful.

ROB: And to piggyback on your opening description of Eva as a charismatic, vibrant character, that was partially a result of us wanting to avoid the tired trope where, in female/male partnerships, the dude is a reckless schlub and the woman is a weary scold. 

But, in looking at this all again, making her the rambunctious, fun-loving one—wanting to see the magic, being fussy about cocktails, needling the old woman—that character choice totally helped us establish the ghost rules because she’s so dynamic, so present, she’s taking every opportunity to poke and interact with this reality that’s just out of reach.

KIT: Eva Goodwin: Manic Pixie Dead Girl. She wants more than a regular old death has to offer her. Though she can’t participate in the world of the living as much as she’d like to, she’s curious and inquisitive about it, and can’t resist reveling in her phantom powers to play with the boundaries of life and death. Tommy’s just along for the ride.

Read our previous Comics Anatomy - Creator Perspective!

Rob Pilkington is a writer based in Los Angeles. He's had short comics published in various anthologies, was named the runner-up in Top Cow's 2019 Talent Hunt, and is the writer of SCI-FI REVUE 2020 and co-creator of DAME FROM THE DARK from TKO Studios. His screenwriting has also been recognized in the Academy’s Nicholl Fellowship semifinals, the 2021 Killer Shorts semifinals, and Hollywood's survey of the best unproduced genre screenplays, the BloodList. He can be found at his website https://www.robpilk.com/ or on Twitter @robpilk.

Kit Mills is a New York-based illustrator, comic artist, and designer. His work has appeared in The LA Times, Vice, Eater, The Village Voice, Food52, and various other places, and he’s working on a graphic novel. He can be found at his website http://mitkills.com/, on Twitter @mitkills, or on Instagram @kitmills.