Issue(s): Cloak and Dagger #4
Cover Date: Jan 86
Title: "Ultimatums"
Credits:
Bill Mantlo - Writer
Rick Leonardi - Penciler
Terry Austin - Inker
Carl Potts - Editor

Review/plot:
As we've seen, Cloak has a very black and white approach to dealing with criminals. Consumers of child porn are as culpable as the purveyors, small time drug dealers get no more mercy than kingpins. Dagger has pushed back on that attitude to a degree but Cloak mostly gets his way. The Beyonder takes Cloak's attitude to a logical extreme in this Secret Wars II tie-in and disintegrates every drug dealer in Manhattan.

This is a turning point for Cloak, who comes to realize that Dagger has been right: some of the drug-dealers may have really been helpless addicts themsevles, or perhaps they were a product of their environments, and there are really degrees of good and evil.

Cloak and Dagger are able to convince the Beyonder of this, even though it means giving up the offer of the Beyonder removing the curse of their powers, and he reverses his mass slaying. He also does a pretty good job of defining Cloak and Dagger. Cloak "represents the darkness - the despair a man may expect as his punishment should he commit a crime". Dagger, meanwhile, is the light of man's salvation.

It'll be interesting to see how this revelation affects the series. Cloak & Dagger's vigilantism was a key part of their characters that distinguished them from, say, Spider-Man. Now that they've seen the logical extrapolation of that way of thinking, will it change them?

Earlier in this issue we get the spectacle of the Beyonder on heroin.

Man, that could be the explanation for every continuity error in this period. Fantastic Four mysteriously back in space? Iron Man manages to fit three issues worth of solo appearances between two minutes in West Coast Avengers? Dude, the Beyonder was on heroin, and he just kept messing stuff up. We're lucky he didn't bring Marvel's Star Comics into continuity or something (i know, i know, that does happen much later, which just proves we're all living in a world ruled by the heroin-fueled whims of a mad god).

Also in this book, Father Delgado remains convinced that he needs to rescue Dagger from Cloak's "satanic influence", and police detective Brigid O'Reilly continues to investigate the corruption in her department.

Mantlo makes a good use of the Beyonder here, and the Leonardi/Austin pairing continues to be a good combination for this series.

Quality Rating: C+

Historical Significance Rating: 1

Chronological Placement Considerations: This is officially a tie-in with Secret Wars II #6, but there aren't any specific dependencies.

References: N/A

Crossover: Secret Wars II

Continuity Insert? N

My Reprint: N/A

Its too bad there isn't an out anymore for the comics being bizarre or nonsensical to the extent of "The Beyonder was high".

Wow, what story brought the Star Comics line into continuity?

A 2009 X-Babies series that takes place in the Mojoverse. Obviously a jokey book; it's not like Top Dog and Planet Terry showed up during Civil War or anything.

Peter Porker the Spiderham is also brought into the main universe through the Spider verse stories.

There's a distinction to be made between "accessible within the Marvel multiverse" (like Spider-Ham) and actually within "616"(the mainstream Marvel U)... Fnord only tracks the latter, so though Spider-Ham exists within the multiverse, he's still out of scope for this project.

Planet Terry is a bit more interesting case, as he's recently popped up in the Drax,/b> series, and it's possible he was intended to be Kree. http://marvel.com/news/comics/26217/drax_who_is_planet_terry