Written by Nick Spencer
Illustrated by Emma RiosThe fan-favorite, critically acclaimed team of Nick Spencer (IRON MAN 2.0) and Emma Rios (OSBORN) answers the overwhelming demands of readers, and puts the beloved heroes Cloak & Dagger back in action…in SPIDER-ISLAND! Everyday citizens fall prey to a mysterious infestation, and Manhattan is quarantined! Cloak & Dagger are at the front line, in the streets. Thousands of people are gifted with great power…and it’s a disaster!
While this may only be a three issue mini and event tie-in on the surface, make no mistake: once you get under the hood, this comic lives and breathes like the start of a new ongoing, and I suspect that was Marvel’s intention all along. Throughout the years, I’ve noticed the same request convention after convention, “more Cloak and Dagger”. To say these two are fan favorites would be a rather large understatement and Marvel’s answer has remained the same, “we’re waiting for the right pitch”. So when it was announced that Nick Spencer AKA the king of writing messed up & violent teenagers (don’t believe me? read Morning Glories and Forgetless) would be helming a sort of “pilot mini” to test the waters for an ongoing C&D series with Emma Rios bringing it all to the page, I couldn’t stop smiling for a while: it was worth the wait, at least in theory. Click on down to see how this debut issue played out.
The issue picks up right where last year’s C/D Nation X One-Shot left off with our titular duo camping out in the same old church where their powers first manifested many moons ago. After an amusing verbal altercation with a city of New York municipal employee, the duo find themselves homeless and wandering in Times Square. It’s at this point that two major turning points occur: Cloak reveals his new “heroes for hire” angle to the Cloak & Dagger crime fighting repertoire (complete with a twitter hashtag) and the two run into a band of Avengers on their way to the riot of spider-powered New Yorkers in a similar fashion to a band of school yard kids running to a fight. After the assembled heroes convince Cloak to teleport them TWO BLOCKS, we learn just how Tandy Bowen has been entering the darkforce dimension in street clothes and exiting as Dagger for all these years (as it happens, she simply turned the lights off on anyone else she happens to be travelling with.)
After a certain point in the fight, Dagger just ups and leaves, much to the confusion and dismay of Cloak (which is ironic given that in their last published story, he was the one disappearing). As it turns out, Dagger has been attending college classes to make up for lost time and to help her move toward something of a normal existence. Well, unfortunately for her it seems some mystic, sassy clairvoyant has told Mr. Negative (apparently transformed back from his Martin Li persona) that Dagger will eventually kill him, which brings the issue to a close. Now, normally I’d be miffed at Mr. Negative being brought in as the big-bad of this one since that has happened a LOT lately in a lot of different books, but in a lot of ways it kind of makes perfect sense that a villain that literally threads the needle between light and dark will end up going head to head with a super hero duo that does the same thing, so I’m excited to see if any further connections end up drawn between the trio.
Now, I’ll admit, the story here is not perfect, most notably the posse of Avengers acting fairly noticeably out of character. However, the story at hand is not about them, and in regard to the heroes on the cover there are several bits of storytelling here that are really just master strokes. For one, condensing the long and relatively complicated origin of Cloak and Dagger into a one page and beautiful two page spread and all at once demystifying the characters for a whole new generation of fans. On top that, the choice to have Cloak and Dagger both be omnipresent dual narrators may seem like a “duh” moment, but the way Spencer strings together these dueling narratives really illuminates what its like to be inside these characters heads and illuminates the difficulties present in their relationship. Speaking of difficulties, another genius move by Spencer was actually injecting some legitimate tension into Cloak and Dagger’s relationship. Simply put, it seems like these two characters that embodied light and darkness got along WAY too seamlessly for two people representing direct polar opposites. Yes, Tandy Bowen and Tyrone Johnson may want to be together, but the entire goddamn universe SHOULD want to keep Cloak and Dagger apart, and it seems like Spencer is picking up that ball and running with it in a myriad of different ways, all of which have the potential to pay off really well.
Continued belowOn the art end, Emma Rios is just absolutely fantastic here. Her work lives and breathes way more like a surrealist painting at times than simple comic art. Her layouts are fluid, often times making it hard to tell where once panel ends and the other begins and fooling the eye into taking in one gigantic, complete story. I’m not sure when the last time I had to stop reading in order to just stop and take in the art fully was, but I’m pretty sure Olivier Coipel or Gabrielle Del’Otto were involved. On top of that, there are a lot of artists in comics today that are really really good at drawing comic book characters moving and fighting and interacting, but so VERY few do it in a way that can be called unique. Emma Rios is unique. I can honestly say that her character designs and the way those characters move on the page is unlike anything I have seen before, and its stunning to think that she is still very much in the opening salvo of what, if there is any decency in the world, will be a long and boisterous career.
If Marvel’s intention was to put out a mini-series that could put a stake in the ground and say “alright, time for an ongoing”, then congratulations guys, you did it with one issue. While what we have here is not 100% perfect, it absolutely makes enough of itself to warrant an ongoing series in my book, and I think with this creative team at the helm it could absolutely end up being the break these characters and by association their fans have been looking for for quite some time.
Final Verdict: 9.5 – Buy and then Buy Again
