First introduced by Lars Anderson in Saucy Romantic Adventures and Mystery Adventures, The Domino Lady is the alter-ego of Ellen Patrick, a wealthy UC Berkeley graduate out to avenge the murder of her father, District Attorney Owen Patrick, in the Raymond Chandler-esque Southern California of 1935. While she brandished a .45 and syringe of knockout serum, her greatest weapon was her sexuality, which she would use to disarm her unsuspecting opponents. Routinely stealing from her targets, she donates most of the profits to charity after deducting her cut, leaving a calling card with the words “Compliments of the Domino Lady” behind.

DL appeared specifically in “spicy pulp” magazines, pulps that typically featured semi-pornographic short stories. Such magazines had smaller print runs (and were as a result a few cents higher in price) and were usually sold “under the counter” upon request. Only a handful of Domino Lady were published, all of which were collected in Bold Venture Press’ Compliments of the Domino Lady, featuring a cover from the one and only Jim Steranko. In addition, Moonstone Books has published a new series of Domino Lady comics and prose stories. The AudioComics Company’s world-premiere productions will mark the first time that the alter-ego of Ellen Patrick has ever appeared in an audio format.

Portraying the Domino Lady will be San Francisco Bay Area actress and filmmaker Karen Stilwell, who has a unique tie to AudioComics; take a read of her bio…
Karen Stilwell began acting in San Francisco at the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco as a teen. After winning a National Theater award for best ensemble work in regional theater (playing a maid in one of Tennessee Williams last plays called This is (an Entertainment)), she was propelled to continue acting after meeting Williams and Michael York and choosing, with the help of “A Chorus Line” summer touring cast members, to go to the Big Apple just after High School at age 17. Within a year she had joined both the Screen Actors Guild and The American Federation ofTelevision and Radio Artists recording voice overs, commercials, under five roles on soap operas like All My Children and The Guiding Light with some small parts in the films Bad Timing: A Sensual Obsession and C.O D.

She became a core member of a theater company called Wild Hair Productions consisting of mainly fellow actors who had met in class and enjoyed writing and acting together in their own plays. The biggest hit to come from the troupe was Starstruck with Karen playing the original Erotica Ann 333, an android built for sex but re programmed to be the maintenance officer on the GOOD ship Harpy.

After several more years of off B’way work, more under five roles on soaps, and a few more national commercials, Karen did some stand in work for the lead ladies in Love Sick (staring Dudley Moore), was taken by the ensemble feeling the film crew had, and decided to get behind the camera herself taking off to film school in San Francisco. Soon Karen was making documentaries and shorts while raising her daughter Jenna. Two of her documentaries made it into the Library of Congress: The Real Jean Roe and Tear Gas Filled the Sky staring longshoreman, activist, writer & actor Bill Bailey. Acting picked up in San Francisco again in the 1990s with parts on television shows shooting in SF, not to mention many industrial films and commercials.

During the 2000’s Karen mainly worked in video post production with some corporate producing jobs and only acted when friends called upon her to jump in on low budget films and such. It wasn’t until reconnecting with Elaine Lee, her old acting troupe buddy, at the revived staged reading of Starstruck in Big Sur (which of course became The AudioComics Company’s debut audio play) that she finds herself ready to get in the nightgown and mask…behind the microphone that is…and play The Domino Lady.

The first Domino Lady project will be a three-part serial authored by one of the country’s leading DL historians, Rich Harvey, with the first part, “All’s Fair in War,” recording this fall in San Francisco, alongside AudioComics’ first two Green Lama audio adventures. The name Rich Harvey is synonymous with pulp stories and pulp history in the United States; a New Jersey-based graphic designer, writer, and publisher, his Bold Venture Press imprint specializes in reprints of classic pulp fiction, among  them Pulp Adventures magazine and Compliments of the Domino Lady, the reprint collection that thrust the Domino Lady back into the pulp limelight. He also sponsors an annual gathering of pulp enthusiasts, the Pulp Adventurecon, in New Jersey. Rich cites Dashiell Hammett as his favorite author and biggest influence, and next on the list is Warren Murphy and Richard Sapir’s The Destroyer series. www.boldventurepress.com is the handle!

“A warm west coast evening — a glamorous city bathed in silvery moonlight — a criminal element walking arm-in-arm with high society — and a masked woman who challenges their power the DOMINO LADY.”