Love and Drugs: Cloak and Dagger
So, this trailer dropped today:
Gotta say, proud of Marvel for going with this one. Cloak and Dagger are a duo who don’t get a lot of love in the comics, and are definitely not commonly known characters whatsoever. After the fiasco that was Netflix’s Iron Fist, it could’ve been easy for the company to give up on non-A listers; blaming the series on the character’s obscurity rather than everything else that went wrong with that show. So kudos for showing support for their full cast of marvelous characters with this move.
After watching the trailer, I was surprised how excited, how hopeful I felt for the show. As a comics snob, it’s really easy to be overly critical of every live action reiteration, but I was taken aback by how fresh this take appears to be. If the series plays like the trailer, they could walk the line between edginess and romance which we all secretly love to death.
But with the hope I have for a potential good series came a lot of concerns as well.
Before we get into any of that, I think the best way to explain why I’m excited — and why I’m worried — is to introduce you to these characters and their messy comic book history.
Cloak: Tyrone Johnson is cross between Teen Titan’s Raven and X-men’s Nightcrawler. He’s got teleportation powers and is sort of intangible…er, sometimes. Also he feeds on light, pulling people into the darkforce dimension where he feasts on the light of his enemies. So yeah, basically that one Teen Titans episode with crazy Raven, only all the time.
Personality wise, Tyrone is reclusive, quiet, and brooding. He sticks by Tandy’s side and keeps to himself, only using his powers when he must.
Dagger: Tandy Bowen got the short end of the superpower stick. She can create light daggers, psionic weapons that drain the life force out of her enemies. That’s about it, combined with some basic Black Widow style fighting. That being said, in some stories her light daggers can heal people…in particular, they can cure teenagers of their drug addictions. But more on that later.
Personality wise, Tandy is compassionate and confident. She guides other young heroes, and is always on the look out for those who need help.
Love: So here’s why I’m super excited for this series.
From the get-go, Cloak and Dagger have always been a team, and always a couple. This is wonderful because you don’t get any forced relationships like freakin’ New 52 Superman & Wonder Woman, nor do you get CW style ughness with Green Arrow and Whatever-Girl-He’s-Dating-This-Season. The romance comes built into the story telling, and neither character has to reduce their uniqueness to be with their significant other. They’re literally made for each other.
So not only can we get a believable love story that makes sense, but also an interesting one that’s not just about their feeeeelies for each other. Plus being an interracial couple promises refreshing romance story discussions, with their separate races reflected directly in their powers (which can either make for an engaging commentary or blatant racism, depending on who’s writing them…).
In its cinematic history, Marvel has royally screwed up in the love department on the big screen, with their only female superhero, Black Widow being passed around as a flirtatious love interest in every movie she’s ever been in. First with Tony Stark in Iron Man 2, then Hawkeye in Avengers, Captain America in Winter Soldier, and Bruce Banner in Avengers 2, their only female lead has been tossed around like a ping pong ball for male characters to banter with, rather than a individual character of great worth to be celebrated on her own. On TV, Marvel’s done better with the likes of Jessica Jones and Agent Carter, but those characters aren’t particularly romantic (nor should they be), and don’t get me started listing the many sins of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.
But here we get a fresh start on characters that can be a love story and an adventure story without reducing the female lead to a heart fluttering side story for a male counterpart.
Even better, this series could be hella’ dark. Like Netflix’s Jessica Jones dark. I hope so. I’d love to see a love story set in the darkest of times.
Drugs: I’ve talked enough about the good and my hopes, so here’s the bad and my fears. And the first one’s a doozy.
None of Cloak and Dagger’s stand alone stories are any good.
If you scroll up, you’ll see that I gave each character a whole paragraph for their powers…and two sentences for their personalities. It’s not that the characters aren’t well developed — they haven’t been developed at all. They sorely lack engaging characteristics.
Sadly, at this moment, I can’t really think of any stand alone Cloak and Dagger series I’d even recommend reading. C&D started out as background characters in a Spider-Man comic during the start of the War on Drugs. Because of this, most of their comics read as PSA’s, with the two running from wannabe drug dealers as they teach kids that drugs are baaaad. Usually, there’s some supervillain making supervillain drugs and passing them out like candy to teens out misspending their youth. Cloak and Dagger show up, destroy the contraband and then stab everyone with light daggers to cure them of their debilitating addictions, along with several lectures about the dangers of super drugs.
Not only is this not new, but it’s in no way interesting.
We get it. Drugs are bad.
Sadly, even their best moments, like in Runaways or Civil War, are still as background characters. When given the spotlight, they tend to flounder. Most writers pick an older story to nod too, add some drug dealers with superpowers, and call it a day. Then the comic gets canceled because no one wants to read about drugs being bad, and C&D get shelved for about ten years before being brought out for a new series, only to have it happen all over again.
No writer has dwelt with the characters, fostered them, helped them grow. Their personalities are bland, a-typical, predictable, when they should be complicated, dynamic, nuanced.
It’s a damned shame too, because they have the potential to be some of Marvel’s greatest characters. In the romance department, they’re downright adorable in that dark edgy, Nightwing Batgirl kindof way.
Their stories aren’t the only problem though. As other creatives have so excellently demonstrated, Cloak and Dagger have had some major hiccups, including everything from wardrobe malfunctions to racist undertones (Cloak has to feed off of Dagger’s light essence to subdue the darkness within him, which is a little too close to The White Man’s Burden for my taste). While the play between light and dark and black and white can be done tastefully, when done poorly, it just hurts to read.
So what do all these problems mean for the TV show? It means they don’t have much to go on — which is a good thing. Starting from the ground up, we could potentially enjoy a series about two kids on the run falling in love with each other, with underlying stories about race, conflict, darkness…and yes, probably drugs.
I hope the best for this series. I’d like a slow burning show that demonstrates not only the weight of the world on young shoulders, but the weight of interracial dating, the fear of isolation, and the significance of using power for good, of working together to make a better world.
If done right, it could set the standard for how we tell superhero love stories.
If done wrong, it’ll just be more CW style nonsense before being canceled after half a season. The characters will have the spotlight for a fleeting moment, only to be put back on the shelf until another attempt in 2027.
