Inker extraordinaire Terry Austin is now the writer for Cloak and Dagger. The romance between the characters takes a larger focus—Dagger is going back to school, and Cloak feels insecure about her having contacts with other students and trying to make herself better. His claustrophobic control over her feels authentic to his power set and the history of his character.
His insecurity drives him to use dark magic to restore his powers after having lost them several issues ago. This upsets Dagger, who thought that by being “normal,” Cloak wouldn’t be pursued by his dark demons and could redeem himself into “normal” life. She leaves him, and we get two solo stories.
Also, they meet Night and Day, who are basically gender-reversed, bad versions of Cloak and Dagger.
And Mr. Jip makes his first appearance.
He’s creepy.
Cloak teams up with Dazzler, who uses her light powers in the same way that Dagger did—to help him feed his darkness when his cloak starts to get out of control again.
He meets her on a rooftop, where she’s singing a Suzanne Vega song.
Then, Dagger meets Black Cat in a hair salon(!), and Felicia tries to corrupt the young girl into the world of burglary, but, of course, Dagger resists. Since this is a split book, both stories are short.
Then, in the final issue of this arc, Dagger and Cloak are reunited.
As for Doctor Strange, in the last story, all of his magical artifacts were destroyed and their powers released demons across the world. So in these stories, he’s rounding them up. There’s a Baron Mordo story and a lot of stuff that ties to the Ancient One. If you’re a fan of the mystical lore of Doc Strange, you’ll probably like these. I find it all a little dull.
There is a change to his look, though, when he loses his eye in a battle because he didn’t listen to Ancient One who warned him he’d put his eye out with that thing.
I guess that kind of qualifies as a new costume.