Cloak and Dagger

10 Marvel runs from the 80s that ought to be omnibuses – 1981 to 1989

May 4, 2017 by krisis

It’s the penultimate stop in our trip backwards through time to find all of the Marvel runs most in need of Omnibus treatment.

Why? For fun. For accumulating rainy-day reading. And, to fuel our 2017 Most Wanted Marvel Omnibus Secret Ballot votes!

Marvel in the 1980s is really a tale of two different Marvels. The first half of the decade featured many continuing 70s series, a handful of limited series, and relatively few new ongoing titles – most of which were direct spinoffs of characters from other books.

However, after Secret Wars II in 1986 the line got a serious shake-up, with many titles outside of what I think of as “The Big 9” and their satellite books getting cancelled or rebooted, plus tons of new ongoing and limited series and a whole new line of comics with New Universe!

(“The Big 9” are all of the lines of books that made it from the Silver Age to 2005 while being published continuously, even if that meant being restarted along the way – , Avengers, Captain America, Daredevil, Iron Man, Fantastic Four, Hulk, Spider-Man, Thor, and X-Men. After 2005, Thor went on hiatus, and Fantastic Four has been on hiatus since 2015.)

(In a totally weird turn of events, we can now probably add Deadpool to that list of evergreen lines.)

Marvel released a lot of comics in the 1980s, so what should Marvel prioritize getting into omnibuses? I’ve already covered all of the X-Men runs from this period, and I’m not touching Spider-Man or Fantastic Four mapping at the moment. Plus, many key 80s runs are on the survey already, like Peter David’s Hulk, Iron Man by by Michelinie & Layton Ann Nocenti’s Daredevil – but that still leaves a ton of potential runs to cover! [Read more…] about 10 Marvel runs from the 80s that ought to be omnibuses – 1981 to 1989

New Collecting Guide: Marvel’s Cloak & Dagger (and an explanation of who they are)

July 18, 2016 by krisis

I’m happy to share The Definitive Cloak & Dagger Collecting Guide and Reading Order! It includes every Cloak & Dagger appearance ever published – both together and apart – with notes on trade-reading order and the importance of guest appearances.

I know what most of your reactions will be – “Who the hell are Cloak & Dagger?” They’re not exactly Marvel’s most-prominent characters and they haven’t had an ongoing series to call their own since the 1990s, but they happen to be Marvel’s most-recent property to garner an order for a television season – on ABC’s Freeform network.

Bright-eyed readers may have seen this guide already, but as of today the guide is officially out of its beta-release phase and ready to help you collect Marvel’s pair of would-be-mutants who recently garnered an order for a TV show!

This is one in a series of new and revised collection pages I’ll be highlighting; last week I covered Doctor Strange, and you can already see several of the others in action in Crushing Comics.

Who are Cloak & Dagger?

The short answer is that they were writer Bill Mantlo’s insertion into Spider-Man of a pair of teens whose lives were altered by the prevalence of street drugs in blighted, early-80s NYC. They adopted the powers of darkness and light and briefly took on a life of their own for the next decade.

Marvel was having a bit of a younger-character resurgence in the early 80s, with Chris Claremont spinning New Mutants off of X-Men and Louise Simonson launching Power Pack. Cloak & Dagger were conceived just prior to those two moves but offered a terrific contrast to them both. They were more rough-around the edges than either team, and lacking in the scholastic environment of Xavier’s school and the familial love of Power Pack. (They would make guest appearances in both series.)

Cloak & Dagger first spun off into a 1983 mini-series after their Spider-Man debut, and then into a 1985 ongoing title that was released bi-monthly. In 1987, they were relaunched into Strange Tales, Vol. 2, a monthly title they split with Doctor Strange.

Then there was the little matter of mutant hysteria. [Read more…] about New Collecting Guide: Marvel’s Cloak & Dagger (and an explanation of who they are)

Marvel Collected Editions Solicits – March, 2017

July 4, 2016 by krisis

Here’s a holiday surprise for you – another month of Marvel solicitations just arrived on Amazon! These books take us though the Amazon release date of March 28, which means these books will hit the direct market on March 14. I covered the January and February solicits last month.

I’ve broken out the books below. They don’t yet list their contents, so I’ve made a few educated guesses until we can fill in the final contents. If you pre-order with Amazon, please keep in mind that Amazon releases dates are two weeks later that Direct Market release dates.

Please note: This post will not be updated with corrected dates, titles, or issue ranges for these titles. For the most up-to-date information, visit the accompanying collection guide pages.

Marvel Masterworks

There’s only one of these books released each month, so this big reveal is a guaranteed feature of each new month of solicits. [Read more…] about Marvel Collected Editions Solicits – March, 2017

Definitive Cloak & Dagger Collecting Guide and Reading Order

The definitive, chronological, and up-to-date guide and trade reading-order on collecting Cloak & Dagger comic books via omnibuses, hardcovers, and trade paperback graphic novels. A part of Crushing Krisis’s Crushing Comics. Last updated November 2017 with titles scheduled for release through July 2019.

Cloak and Dagger are a very 80s odd couple: a pair of teenage runaways from opposite sides of the tracks and get mixed up in drugs with a superhero twist.

As you’d expect for the, it’s blonde-haired, naive Tandy Bowen who comes from the moneyed upbringing and book-smart and street-smart Tyrone Johnson grew up poor. They bond while on the streets, but after being kidnapped and injected with synthetic heroine, they come away with newfound superpowers! Bowen gainst he power of psionic light, while Johnson gains access to the Darkforce Dimension

The pair were conceived and written by Bill Mantlo in the pages of Spectacular Spider-Man in 1983, and he wrote them almost exclusively for their first four years across three series. Mantlo kept their focus mostly on battling drug dealers and other reality-based street-level menaces, rather than super villains.

When Mantlo left them in 1987, their focus shifted – the book was even relaunched as “The Mutant Misadventures of” to try to tie the duo into the white-hot X-Men. It didn’t work, and in 1991 they were cancelled just as Claremont and Lee’s run on X-Men reached its peak of sales. Despite the fleeting “mutant” label, Cloak and Dagger were never a part of the X-books and would be later re-retconned as non-mutants.

Since 1991, Cloak and Dagger have been relegated to permanent guest-star status. Cloak tends to feature more-prominently, since he’s one of relatively few teleporters in Marvel’s arsenal and a suitably stoic foil to other lead characters, like Wolverine. The pair saw a brief revival as part of the Marvel Knights team in 200o, and later from 2009 to 2011 with participation in Dark Reign and Spider-Island stories. Afterwards, it was back to occasional guest star status – although that might not last for long, given they were greenlit for a television pilot in 2015.

Do you need a longer introduction? Head to my blog post announcing this guide. [Read more…] about Definitive Cloak & Dagger Collecting Guide and Reading Order