Issue(s): Marvel Team-Up annual #6
Cover Date: 1983
Title: "The hunters and the hunted!"
Credits:
Bill Mantlo - Writer
Ron Frenz - Penciler
Kevin Dzuban - Inker
Tom DeFalco - Editor

Review/plot:
While the New Mutants are on a field trip to NYC, Wolfsbane and Sunspot get captured by a group of criminals trying to replicate the drugs that created Cloak & Dagger.

Spider-Man, Cloak & Dagger, and the rest of the New Mutants show up to help.

There's a strange effect when Wolfsbane and Sunspot, affected by the drugs, attack Dagger and Cloak (respectively), that causes their powers to go out of control...

...but they are able to cancel each others' powers out.

There's a nice meeting where Spider-Man recognizes the New Mutants' costumes and assumes they are X-Men. I think it's the first time anyone actually refers to the teen mutants as New Mutants.

Decent art by Ron Frenz. Not a great story, but Chris Claremont will build on this in some later issues of the New Mutants.

Quality Rating: C

Historical Significance Rating: 2

Chronological Placement Considerations: The MCP has this between New Mutants #4-5, after Cloak & Dagger's appearance in Peter Parker, the Spectacular Spider-Man #82, and after the Cloak & Dagger mini-series. (In their Spider-Man entry, though, they have it way back in the middle of a bunch of comics from 1982, which can't be right.)

References:

• Spider-Man first met Cloak & Dagger in Peter Parker, the Spectacular Spider-Man #64.

Crossover: N/A

Continuity Insert? N

My Reprint: Marvel Tales #247, Marvel Tales #248

I always thought this issue takes place after the Cloak and Dagger limited series. It seems like Father Delgado first met Cloak and Dagger in their limited series - in this issue he's clearly known them for some time.

The MCP agrees with you and I've moved it accordingly. Thanks!

Butch Guice was the originally announced artist.

Frenz draws a really good Spider-man in these panels. I can tell he used Romita's classic late 60's Spidey head shots as reference.

I've never read this story, but at least in these scans, I like the way Spider-Man is mostly just standing there, like the only adult in the room. Which he is.

I feel like the chronological placing of this issue is more complicated than it first appears. The question: where is Karma (Xi'an Coy Manh)? She's neither shown nor mentioned. This leads one to believe that it's after her apparent death at the end of NM#6/beginning of NM#7. The problem is, that apparent death (which Xavier even calls out as not having happened at the time, but which the NM believe) is followed by the NM going directly to Rio (NM#7) with Sunspot's mom, and then to an Amazon exploration, in the course of which the meet Magma/Amara, who then goes back with them and join the team. But of course SHE'S not in this issue either!

Point being: there WAS no time where the NM were plausibly in NYC (especially after what Roberto calls a hard month of study in Westchester — he complains early on) AFTER Karma's apparent death but BEFORE Magma joins the team. So why are those four there?

...The only solution, I suppose, is that Karma didn't join them for some reason, and is also, for some reason, never mentioned. But it's a bit of a chronological glitch.

Stephen, at the MCP we have a rule- don't judge a story by a character's absence or by what isn't mentioned. For all we know, Karma took her siblings to Disneyland.