This is the first appearance of Mayhem, a cop who gets powers while looking into bad NYPD cops, which enables her to be a vigilante alongside Cloak and Dagger.
She gets her powers because she’s killed by poison gas—by the same cops she was investigating—but Dagger injects her with her light powers and this brings her back as a ghostlike character with the ability to manifest the poisonous gas that killed her.
Fun little aside: Jim Steranko appears on a tombstone, and the stone for “Howard Flag” appears to be a tribute to Howard Chaykin who, at the time, had recently launched the highly successful—and controversial—indie comic titled American Flagg, about a tough, almost Dredd-like cop…
A truly brilliant comic for its time, and one that influenced creators as well as the business-side of comics, for many years.
American Flagg, that is. Not Cloak and Dagger. This is definitely not a brilliant comic.
Issue #5 is artist Terry Shoemaker’s first Marvel comic. Rick Leonardi returns with #6.