Dakota North (titled Dakota North Investigations on covers) is a 1986 comic book by Marvel Comics. It's written by Martha Thomases and illustrated by Tony Salmons, with color art by Christie Scheele.
Private detective Dakota North has a struggling business and a complicated family. Her father's a cantankerous old retired CIA agent, her little brother's precocious and annoying, and both of them seem to be getting mixed up with her cases.
When Dakota's agency is hired to investigate a campaign of threats against a fashion designer, the trail leads to a much bigger case, with links to her family - and it seems that her involvement was no coincidence.
Although Dakota was later integrated into the shared Marvel Universe, there's no mention of Marvel's costumed heroes or superpowers in her series and it's essentially a standalone adventure story.
The first issue was released June 1 1986.
After her own series ended, Dakota returned as a supporting character for several of Marvel's heroes, including Jessica Jones, Luke Cage, and Daredevil.
Unlike Dakota herself, supporting character Luke Jacobsen has also appeared in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, making his debut in She-Hulk: Attorney at Law.
Dakota North provides examples of:
- Action Girl: Dakota deals with everything from car and bike chases to gunfights, snipers, knife fights and attempts to torture her while she's held prisoner. She's competent, lethally effective and generally unflappable through all of it.
- Assassin Outclassin': Hired killer Mr. Grey tries to strangle Dakota in an airplane bathroom, only to find that she's smuggled a non-metallic knife past the airport's Metal Detector Checkpoint. She leaves his body in the bathroom.
- Bad Boss: Sheik Ibn Bheik has his falcon kill one injured minion for making excuses, and is said to mistreat some of the others. This eventually gets him killed - one of his men gets hold of the nerve gas sample and declares himself the new boss after the Sheik's believed to be electrocuted. He refuses to give it back when the Sheik regains consciousness, citing the abuse he's had to put up with. The two scuffle, the nerve gas gets released and both die.
- Big Bad: Cleo Vanderlip is behind almost everything that happens in the series. The abrupt cancellation of the comic also leaves her as an unpunished Karma Houdini, especially as she's not reappeared in later stories.
- Camping a Crapper: When Dakota flies to Paris, hired killer Mr. Grey waits until she goes to the plane's bathroom, then lets himself in to strangle her. He doesn't know that Dakota has smuggled a non-metallic knife on board, though, so after a little Assassin Outclassin', it's Grey's body that's left there as the plane lands.
- Captain Ersatz: During this initial series, Dakota North is a near copy of Ms. Tree, an indie comic character by Max Collins and Terry Beatty. This would get lampshaded years later by Ms. Tree parodying the original covers for Dakota North's book.
- Cut Short: The series ends abruptly with issue #5, leaving S.J. and Cleo's fate unclear. It's sufficiently abrupt that there's nothing on the cover or within the story to indicate that it's the last issue, only a note at the end of the final page:This is where we usually put the blurb for the next issue, if there was a next issue, but there isn't.
- Fake Action Prologue: The first issue starts with Mad Dog shouting to warn Dakota and repeatedly firing at a half-seen silhouette. The next page reveals that they're in Dakota's basement and he's just failed a Shooting Gallery practice by panicking and shooting a "bag lady" target dummy.
- Hidden Weapons: As one assassin discovers the hard way, Dakota carries a concealed knife when she's travelling by plane. It's got a non-metallic blade so she can sneak it through Metal Detector Checkpoints.
- Private Detective: And is quite good at her job.
- Punny Name: Sheik Ibn Bheik is apparently a pun on 'Shake and Bake’.
- Ripped from the Headlines: The gas leak that killed thousands and was then covered up (with a chemical company taking the blame) is a fictional version of the Bhopal disaster in india, which happened two years before the comic was published.
- Self-Disposing Villain: When it seems that Sheik Ibn Bheik's been electrocuted, one of his minions claims the pen containing the nerve gas sample. Once the Sheik regains consciousness, the two men briefly scuffle over it, the pen breaks, and both are fatally poisoned.
- Transforming Vehicle: Sheik Ibn Bheik has a private rail carriage which can detach from its train and convert into a bus.
