Issue(s): Cloak and Dagger #12, Cloak and Dagger #13
Cover Date: Jun-Aug 90
Title: "Duplicity, deceptions and Doctor Doom!" / "The big oblivion scenario"
Credits:
Terry Austin - Writer
Rick Leonardi - Penciler
Terry Austin - Inker
Eric Fein - Assistant Editor
Danny Fingeroth - Editor

Review/plot:
Terry Austin's Cloak and Dagger was pretty weird and missed the mark more or less the whole way through, but at least he gets an opportunity to put his toys away before leaving the series. For his final two issues, he also inks and is reunited with Rick Leonardi, making this the return of the art team that drew the original Cloak and Dagger mini-series.

Of course, this series has been the polar opposite of those issues, with their focus on gritty street crime. These issues instead have the final battle with Mr. Jip and even include an appearance by Dr. Doom.

Father Delgado, secretly a thrall of Mr. Jip, is released from the hospital and he returns to the Holy Ghost church. And then Detective "Rusty" Nales comes running in with Brigid O'Reilly, who is having trouble. She reveals to everyone that Mr. Jip has replaced one of her eyes with one of his own.

Meanwhile, Mr. Jip makes a pact with Dr. Doom. He'll deliver Dagger to Dr. Doom in return for a spellbook.

Cloak decides to go with Rusty and Brigid to Mr. Jip's lair at the North Pole, but everyone insists that Dagger stay behind since she's blind. That, of course, just leaves her vulnerable to Father Delgado. Mr. Jip kills Delgado (note the shock on Night's face, which will be important later)...

...and then, disguised as Delgado, Jip stabs Father Bowen (he'll turn out to be ok in the end).

Mr. Jip/Delgado has tricked Dagger into getting on a plane with him to rush to an aging eye doctor that he's pretending to have just learned about. There's no time to waste, because the guy could die at any minute! Surely that's the sort of person you want operating on your eyes.

The plane is actually populated by Dr. Doom's robots.

She eventually figures out about the robots.

Cloak, meanwhile, had a vision of Dagger being in danger, so he teleported out of the North Pole, leaving Rusty and Brigid behind, and shows up to absorb the entire plane into his cloak. Turns out that train from last issue was nothing.

All of Doom's robots are torn apart by various monsters that live in Cloak's cloak...

...and Mr. Jip surrenders, promising that he'll restore Dagger's sight.

Which he does.

But he's still planning on betraying Cloak and Dagger. Night has captured Rusty and Brigid. So he's assuming that Night will also take care of Cloak and Dagger for him. However, Night is no longer loyal to Mr. Jip. After Jip let Day die, and after he killed Father Delgado despite his loyalty to Jip, Night no longer trusts him.

Mr. Jip still has another ace up his sleeve: the fact that he's got control of Brigid. But that doesn't pan out either.

Mr. Jip is killed. Night tells Dagger that they are still enemies (but she'll never appear again, as far as i know). Then Jip's North Pole fortress crumbles without him being there to sustain it, but when everyone (except Night) rushes out the door, they wind up coming out from a vacant apartment across from Dagger's father's place.

I'm not a huge fan of Dr. Doom appearing in Cloak and Dagger, but this wasn't the first time, and in any event in the end he just kind of shrugs his shoulders about the whole thing. No big deal.

Thanks to the fact that Austin is wrapping up his run (sooner than he expected, i assume), there's an uptick in these issues, just due to the fact that things are happening. Dagger's blindness has bogged down this entire series to date, so getting that undone is great. Finally dealing with Brigid O'Reilly's problem is good too, and i'm more than happy to see Mr. Jip killed off. Same with Father Delgado; he didn't have to die, but he's just been a crazy person for so long that there was nothing to do with him in the series.

More generally, Cloak and Dagger have a pretty easy to define remit that should have been entirely viable at a time when the Punisher and the like were popular. Cloak and Dagger help troubled kids. Runaways, drug addicts, child abuse cases, etc.. There's a million stories you can do while keeping the duo at street level, and plenty of room for conflict with other heroes who either don't approve of their vigilante methods (the early C&D/Spider-Man interactions) or maybe with "heroes" more willing to shoot drug dealers than address the root causes of their problems (i.e. Punisher). You can also get into more general Spider-Man/Daredevil stuff, but Cloak and Dagger have a unique niche that was still close enough to the grim & gritty books that it should have found an audience. But they went remarkably off track almost at the beginning of their first ongoing series and it got into really crazy territory when Austin took over. Space aliens, demons, weird mutants stuff. As i've said, i feel like there could have been some book out there for Austin to do some crazy stuff in, but he never made any of it feel like it related to the characters of this series.

Beginning next issue, the "Mutant Misadventures" label is dropped, and Steve Gerber, replacing Austin, starts things off in the right direction. But even then the book will immediately veer off again in weird directions. More on that in the next entry, of course. But it's so odd how this book just didn't seem like it could stay true to its own theme.

Statement of Ownership Total Paid Circulation: Average of Past 12 months = 68,700. Single issue closest to filing date = 54,200.

Quality Rating: C-

Historical Significance Rating: 2 - death of Mr. Jip and Father Delgado

Chronological Placement Considerations: Dr. Doom is said to still be a refugee in exile. The story beginning next issue is a multi-part story that runs until the series' cancellation with issue #19, and since it's a bi-monthly book that means it runs until Aug 91. And the story references Excalibur #36 (Apr 91), so it will have to take place after that.

References:

• Father Delgado was injured in Cloak and Dagger #8. In that same arc, Brigid O'Reilly went to Mr. Jip to get her humanity restored (she died and became Mayhem in the previous volume's Cloak and Dagger #5).
  
• Dr. Doom is happy to help Mr. Jip deal with Cloak and Dagger because of Cloak's previous interference with his plans in the previous volume's Cloak and Dagger #10.
  
• We learned the Mr. Jip was the first disciple of the Ancient One in Strange Tales #11.
  
• Dagger became blind in Cloak and Dagger #1. That's also the issue where Day died.
  
• The empty apartment was mentioned in Cloak and Dagger #5 during one of Dagger's blindness training sessions.

Crossover: N/A

Continuity Insert? N

My Reprint: N/A

Cloak's being able to teleport all the way from the North Pole seems ridiculously contrived. Yes, he was able to teleport to Paris when Tyrannus commanded him to in that Spider-Man Annual but Tyrannus had the Flame of Life.