Issue(s): Cloak and Dagger #5
Cover Date: Mar 86
Title: "Mayhem"
Credits:
Bill Mantlo - Writer
Terry Shoemaker - Penciler
Terry Austin - Inker
Carl Potts - Editor

Review/plot:
Cloak & Dagger's vigilante nature has been tempered thanks to the Beyonder showing them its logical extreme last issue, and with this issue a new character is created to further contrast the newly moderate Cloak & Dagger with their old ways.

The character isn't entirely new; it's detective Brigid O'Reilly, who has been a part of Cloak & Dagger's cast since their original miniseries. And for the past several issues she's been investigating corruption in her own department. And in thanks for that, corrupt cops trap her in a contraption in a warehouse and hit her with poison gas. As she's dying, she shouts that if she managed to escape, she wouldn't wait for any judge or jury, and "the mayhem I'd cause would purify the whole department of your kind". She does die, but Dagger arrives and attempts to revive her with light. A little while later, O'Reilly comes back as Mayhem, a zombie-ish specter, whose powers include a combination of poison gas and ferocity and strength.

Cloak and Dagger are forced to fight her, but in the end Mayhem is able to convince Cloak, at least, to help her track down the drug dealers that the duo have already been looking for for the past few issues.

We learn that the drug dealers are planing to use a street fair organized by Father Delgado to distribute their drugs.

Earlier, while interrogating thugs about the drug shipment, Cloak absorbs one into his cloak where he has a vision involving a graveyard and the names Howard Flag (a reference to Howard Chaykin's American Flagg) and Steranko can be seen on gravestones.

Quality Rating: C+

Historical Significance Rating: 2 - Brigid O'Reilly becomes Mayhem

Chronological Placement Considerations: N/A

References:

• The warehouse where O'Reilly becomes Mayhem is the same one where Cloak and Dagger were given the drugs that gave them their powers, as shown in Peter Parker, the Spectacular Spider-Man #64.
  
• O'Reilly has been aware of corruption in her department since Cloak and Dagger #1.
  
• The drugs in this issue are the same shipment that Cloak & Dagger lost track of thanks to Spider-Man in Cloak and Dagger #3.

Crossover: N/A

Continuity Insert? N

My Reprint: N/A

Mayhem is a lot like DC's Spectre.