Tyrone JohnsonCloak

While best known for his association with Dagger (Tandy Bowen), Cloak is still a force to be reckoned with on his own. Gifted with teleportation and intangibility, Cloak has access to the “Darkforce Dimension,” a world of strange ebony energy. While formidable alone, Cloak’s relationship with Dagger makes the team nearly unstoppable.

As the results of an experiment gone awry, Tyrone and Tandy are two heroes cut from the same cloth. Tandy’s presence keeps Tyrone’s own darkness and hunger for human life at bay. This makes their relationship not only a working one, but an essential one that runs beyond friendship and love.

Escape Into the Darkness

Raised in a poor South Boston neighborhood, Tyrone Johnson was a good student despite his chronic stutter, which he struggled to correct with the support of his best friend Billy. When Tyrone was seventeen, he and Billy witnessed the robbery of a local store and the fatal shooting of its clerk. The thieves fled, and Billy ran as well, fearing that he and Tyrone might be wrongly suspected of the crime. When a policeman ordered Billy to stop, Tyrone tried to proclaim Billy’s innocence. His stutter made it too hard for him to speak clearly, and the officer shot Billy dead. Feeling responsible for Billy’s death and afraid of the police, Johnson ran away to New York City.

Upon arriving at Manhattan’s Port Authority Bus Terminal, a penniless Tyrone considered robbing Tandy Bowen, a rich girl who also ran away from home. But when someone else robbed her first, Tyrone impulsively tackled the thief and returned Tandy’s purse. The two teens became fast friends. When the naïve Tandy accepted an offer of shelter from some strange men, a wary Tyrone went along to protect her. The two teens were soon forcibly delivered to criminal chemist Simon Marshall, who was developing a new synthetic heroin for the Maggia and testing it on runaway teens with fatal results.

Johnson and Bowen somehow survived injections of the drug and fled. During their escape, Tyrone found himself engulfed in darkness and seized by a strange hunger, which was eased in the presence of Tandy, who began glowing with a brilliant light. In an attempt to hide his newly shadowy appearance in a makeshift cloak, Tyrone began absorbing Marshall’s thugs into his darkness while Tandy struck them down with daggers of light. The two teens dubbed themselves Cloak and Dagger and declared war on drug crime.

Shadowy Skills

Cloak can access the Darkforce Dimension and is linked to a pocket realm dominated by the Predator, which compels Cloak to absorb the life forces of other beings. Dagger’s light can temporarily satisfy his craving. Cloak can also channel Darkforce to create a field of darkness in his general vicinity, though it can spread well beyond the confines of his cloak. People enveloped by Cloak’s darkness feel numbing cold and crippling fear, sometimes seeing disturbing visions. Overlong exposure to the darkness can drive people insane. Dagger’s light renders her largely immune to Cloak’s darkness, and she can extend her light to protect others within Cloak’s darkness if needed. Unprotected victims trapped in Cloak’s dark realm are gradually drained of their life force, and presumably die unless Cloak releases them.

Cloak can “teleport” by entering the Darkforce Dimension, moving a short distance within it and emerging back on Earth a great distance from his point of origin. Cloak can teleport other persons or objects along with himself in this fashion, too, a feat usually reserved for Dagger since most beings cannot safely traverse the Darkforce. As Cloak, Tyrone is usually intangible, though he can solidify through an act of will or by absorbing enough light to saturate his form temporarily. On the rare occasions that he resumes human form, he usually reverts to his old stutter, which vanishes when he becomes Cloak. Tyrone is also physically stronger as Cloak.

Evil Opposition

Cloak and Dagger find sanctuary at the Holy Ghost Church with the sympathetic Father Francis Delgado. But over time, Delgado becomes romantically obsessed with Tandy. Regarding Cloak as a demonic influence, Delgado tries and fails to split up the duo, going mad in the process.

Cloak and Dagger find a new mentor in Tandy’s uncle, Father Michael Bowen. Later, after returning from abroad, they learn Father Delgado has gone insane and they battle the spirit of Jack the Ripper, unleashed by the Predator. They also have run-ins with the man-rat Rodent (Edward Williams, AKA Vermin), wannabe Super Villain Zapper (“Little” Caesar Cirgliano), and the demon Nightmare.

Tandy’s father becomes a cult leader called the Lord of Light in India after discovering his own light powers through meditation. A “light vampire” who feeds on others’ life force, he clashes with Cloak and Dagger. Realizing he is deranged from absorbing the life forces of others, Cloak and Dagger fight him until Tandy’s pleas move him to commit suicide by leaping inside Cloak.

Trustworthy Allies

Cloak’s biggest ally is Tandy, as the two operate most effectively as a team.

Police detective Brigid O’Reilly considers the duo to be a menace until they help her capture serial poisoner Duane Hellman. Later, when O’Reilly is betrayed and left for dead by corrupt cops (who poisoned her with a gas developed by Simon Marshall), Cloak and Dagger use their powers to save her life, but Brigid’s body and mind are mutated into the vicious super human vigilante Mayhem. O’Reilly’s former partner, police detective Rebecca “Rusty” Nales, becomes an ally to Cloak and Dagger as well.

Cloak and Dagger befriend Father Lantom of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, who sympathizes with their crime-fighting and grants them refuge at St. Patrick’s when they needed it. In return, the duo support Lantom’s parish and its charitable works, though they remain devoted to their vigilante work.

Cloak and Dagger befriend the Runaways, who later aided the duo after Dagger’s obsessed fan Reginald Mantz brutalizes her while disguised as Cloak. Cloak and the Runaways bring Mantz to justice and helped revive Dagger, despite misguided interference from the Avengers, who try to arrest Cloak for Mantz’s crimes.

Interconnected Purpose

Cloak and Dagger started out as merciless vigilantes, killing Simon Marshall despite the interference of Spider-Man, who later becomes their friend. After ill-fated assassination attempts on the crime lords Silvermane and Kingpin, Dagger became less ruthless and tried to steer Cloak in a similar direction. However, since his power compelled him to consume living beings, Cloak found it more difficult to follow this gentler path. Cloak and Dagger twice aided the New Mutants, junior trainees of the X-Men. The duo eventually learned they were mutants themselves, and that Marshall’s drug had awakened their latent powers. When Sunspot and Wolfsbane inadvertently stole Cloak and Dagger’s powers via their shared link, Tyrone and Tandy worked with Professor Xavier to reverse the process and break the connection, unwilling to inflict their burden on others.

In France, Dagger was offered a job with the Eurocirque after showing off her acrobatic skills. With Eurocirque temporarily heading the same way as a shipment for drug runners, Cloak indulged Dagger’s desire for a sabbatical and she performed as Lady Light until the circus was attacked.

After a side trip to Latveria, where they battled Doctor Doom, Cloak continued to struggle with his power and the hungry Predator within his darkness. The drug-dealing crime boss Ecstasy (Renee Deladier) twice stole Cloak’s powers for herself, largely because the Predator within Cloak preferred the more ruthless Deladier as a host body. Cloak regained his powers both times, thanks in part to Doctor Strange. When the dream-demon Nightmare targeted Cloak, Tyrone prevailed with the aid of Doctor Strange and Dagger, who nullified Cloak’s darkness altogether. However, Tyrone feared that Dagger could only relate to him as Cloak, and he was manipulated into reclaiming his dark powers by the malevolent mystic Mr. Jip. Tyrone’s willing resumption of his Cloak form estranged him from Dagger, who briefly worked with the Black Cat. Meanwhile, Cloak tried and failed to find a new partner in Dazzler. By this time, Jip tried to take over Cloak’s body with the aid of his agents, Night and Day. Dagger defeated them all with the aid of the Predator and the partners were reunited.

Though Cloak and Dagger once rescued homeless youth Anna Johnson from cultists, only Anna was aware that she was Tyrone’s long-lost sister.

Cloak and Dagger joined forces with Spider-Man, Captain America, Black Cat, Nightwatch, Iron Fist, Deathlok, Morbius, Venom, and Firestar in order to defeat Carnage. Apparently killed by Carnage’s wife, Shriek, Dagger was later revealed as healing with Cloak’s shroud.

During a period when Cloak had gone missing, Dagger helped form an unofficial vigilante alliance alongside Daredevil (Matt Murdock), Black Widow (Natasha Romanoff) and others, devoting much of their time to hunting their murderous fellow vigilante Punisher (Frank Castle). Locating Cloak, with Doctor Strange’s assistance they expunged Nightmare’s influence, driving the darkness from him, but it secretly took residence within Dagger, occasionally emerging to feed without Dagger’s knowledge.

The duo teamed up with the LAPD to find a group of young runaways. These were none other than Alex Wilder, Nico Minoru, Karolina Dean, Molly Hayes, Chase Stein, and Gertrude Yorkes. What Cloak and Dagger did not know was that the police were in the pocket of the kids’ parents, who were known as the Pride.

After being subdued by the kids, Cloak and Dagger learned of the Pride and its control over the city, particularly its police force. They agreed to help the Runaways, but the Pride was able to capture the pair of them and wiped their memories clean. The procedure knocked Cloak and Dagger unconscious, and Alice Hayes was able to plant a false memory of binge-drinking in their minds.

Cloak did Luke Cage a favor by transporting the New Avengers to Stark Tower so they could steal a jet from Tony Stark. When Luke asked Cloak if he’d help them find a Skrull ship, Cloak declined and disappeared.

The duo was approached by Norman Osborn who wanted them to join his Dark X-Men. The two initially refused since they didn’t consider themselves mutants. While Cloak remained dubious, Dagger agreed to join when Osborn promised them that they could fight drugs on a global scale. Cloak and Dagger joined and fought against Hellion, Sunspot, Match, Meld, Lorelei Travis, Adam X, and Avalanche (mutants who were protesting Osborn) during their first mission. However, they soon defected to the real X-Men when they learned Osborn was torturing mutants. Cloak forged a strong working relationship with Wolverine, and together they trapped Romulus in the Darkforce Dimension. After Dr. Nemesis (James Bradley) learned Dagger was not a mutant, the duo quit and returned to New York City.

Cloak and Dagger switched powers when Dagger was corrupted by Mister Negative to use the Dark Force. This caused a “hunger” for light, without which, she would die. Cloak begged Negative for help and his powers became dependent on light, which Cloak then fed to Dagger. This triggered an explosion which reversed their abilities, the ones they were meant to have before their encounter with D’Spayre.