She-Hulk’s fashion designer, Luke Jacobson, is a deep-cut Marvel cameo

It may seem like every installment of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, whether TV episode or movie, comes with something to make fans go “Oooh, Easter egg!” But in its fifth episode, She-Hulk: Attorney At LawMight have been the crown prince of Marvel Comics deep-cuts.

Ladies and gentlemen, it’s a brave new world. MCU has just mentioned it. Dakota North.

[Ed. note: This piece contains spoilers for She-Hulk episode 5.]

Image: Marvel Studios

She-Hulk Episode 5 explores the challenges of dressing as a woman with a height of two feet and muscle mass of a couple hundred pounds. But luckily Jen’s bestie/paralegal is already working on a solution, tracking down the secretive fashion designer Luke Jacobson — played by The Flight Attendant’s Griffin Matthews — who only designs battle gear for superheroes. He is convinced to accept the task of designing Jen’s transition wardrobe. Not “transition” from summer to fall, or day to night, but Jen to She-Hulk.

The answer to the question “Who designs and produces all these superheroes’ outfits?” is one that comics creators have answered frequently in creative ways. In Gotham City, the 2000s saw the introduction of the Tailor. This neutral player dressed both heroes and villains. Marvel Comics’ Wasp is a founder member of Avengers, and also an internationally renowned fashion designer. She creates superhero wear as well for her friends. The four-armed Jumbo Carnation is the top mutant designer.

Luke Jacobson, however? It’s a pull from the little-known Dakota North.

As Keith Silva wrote in a 2018 feature for the Comics Journal: “To say Dakota North was an outlier is a disservice to outliers.” The first issue of the series was published in June 1986, and its fifth and final installment came only eight months later. It was written by Martha Thomases with Tony Salmons drawing it. Both are relatively new to comics. Dakota North wasn’t even set within the Marvel Comics universe, though its lead, Dakota, would eventually appear in in-universe comics, guesting alongside characters like Luke Cage, Daredevil, and Power Pack.

Dakota North is who? She’s the leather-jacket-wearing, quip-slinging, motorcycle-riding, butt-kicking, take-no-shit head and sole operational employee of, as Silva puts it, an “international private security agency specializing in cases of malfeasance within the fashion industry.” And Luke Jacobson was her first case.

Luke Jacobson: Who are you?

Image by Martha Thomases, Tony Salmons/Marvel Comics

Well, he’s a fashion designer unknowingly caught up in some complicated corporate intrigue who’s getting threats of violence. He’s a dead ringer for Fabio, is generally useless, and dances to Donna Summer. He’s also constantly proposing marriage and expressing his love for Dakota — despite, or perhaps, in an editorial sense, because of what you’ve probably already gathered: He was absolutely supposed to be gay.

Writer Martha Thomases told Silva that Jacobson was based on “my friend, the fashion designer David Freelander, who died of AIDS in 1987. The character should have been gay and HIV+. But, I was unable to make it happen. [Marvel editor Larry Hama] said that wasn’t why people read comics. I suspect that, if the series had continued, we would have gone there.”

Image by Martha Thomases, Tony Salmons/Marvel Comics

Thomases may have been hopeful, but Marvel Comics’ history of outright banning or otherwise downplaying queer characters would continue for Most importantlyA few more years.

Only five of the issues in this issue are from Dakota NorthLuke only appeared in three episodes and was never included in the Marvel Universe. What will his future hold? She-Hulk, Attorney at LawIs it possible to have comics about incarnation inspired by the work of comics artists? It’s good to believe so.