Cloak and Dagger (1983) 2

Bellyful of Blues
By Bill Mantlo, Rick Leonardi, and Terry Austin
Nov 1983

Cloak and Dagger hunt down a man who has been poisoning unsuspecting victims. They spot Detective O'Rielly at the funeral for one of the victims. They pay her a visit. She has more or less solved the crime and just needs to apprehend the perpetrator. She tells them who he is and where she thinks he will strike next.

Cloak has some real trouble dealing with his hunger for human souls in this story. He feeds off the life force of a pimp who. I really wish that there was more to his character than his hunger. He claims to be doing good when he attacks the pimp but he seems to do it as much out hunger as he does to protect another, one of the pimp's women.

There's a moment where Dagger tries to revive the murdered woman and realizes she cannot. She has demonstrated the ability to heal people, in particular to cure them of their drug dependencies, but resurrection is beyond her. I like how this moment is handled. It is in moments like this that I see what maybe moved me about this series when it first came out. By that I mean that they are superheroes but that they have limitations because of their powers (Cloak) and that they encounter dilemmas that their powers cannot help them with (Dagger).

The story ends with Cloak consuming the poisoner within the folds of his cloak. Did the man deserve it? Probably but once again what is Cloak's motivation? I suppose he can have more than one but one of them seems more like instinct than rational thought.

I like the look of the book for the most part. There is one panel, actually a splash page where Detective O'Rielly's pose seems odd for a police detective. I seem to delight in finding these incongruities.

This mini-series isn't living up to my memories of it. The story beats are familiar but when I put them all together it feels like there is something missing. Where is the emotional center? Cloak and Dagger don't feel three dimensional and considering that the story is taking place in the "real" world and involves "real" issues of the day that makes this gap a problem. I'm not going to quit on this 4-issue limited series but I'm halfway through and I'm not feeling it.