Greatest Lineup Ever Assembled Under A Single Cloak
Two months in over here at Dimes + Daggers, and it’s time we had the talk.
Your parents probably didn’t explain this to you, your overworked teachers barely have time to cover the first Secret War and it’s rare that the second even gets mentioned in textbooks, and if you get your comics news from YouTube, and your local comic shop guy is too busy figuring out which new distribution system he’s got to learn this week to set you straight.
So here it goes.
The best lineup of artistic talent on a single Marvel Comics ongoing title featuring at least eight different artists across an eleven-issue span with no fill-in artist drawing more than a single story wasn’t on Amazing Spider-Man. And before you ask, it wasn’t on Web of Spider-Man or Spectacular Spider-Man, even though those books sometimes went years between regular creative teams.
It must be Uncanny X-Men, you say. “Didn’t that have a bunch of great guest artists between the John Romita Jr. and Marc Silvestri runs?” And you’d be pretty close. Issues 210-219 featured outgoing artist John Romita Jr., Bret Blevins, Rick Leonardi, Alan Davis, Barry Windsor-Smith, Jackson Guice, and Marc Silvestri (doing a tryout issue before officially landing the ongoing gig) all bringing their A-game, but come on, this was Marvel’s most popular title, Davis and Blevins did two issues apiece, Guice did two back-to-back, and the math doesn’t back you up.
No, we’re talking about the short-lived Cloak and Dagger ongoing series, which ran for 11 bi-monthly issues from 1985-87. The entire series was written by Cloak and Dagger’s co-creator, Bill Mantlo, every issue inked by Terry Austin, lettered by Ken Bruzenak, colored by Glynis Oliver—a real Murderer’s Row of comic book talent. The first four issues and the sixth were drawn by Rick Leonardi (a Dimes + Daggers favorite!), who’d established both himself and C + D as up-and-coming fan-favorites with a 1983 mini-series spotlighting the star-crossed teenage crimefighters. Marvel was hedging their bets on the ongoing title from the start by only publishing it every other month, which meant that readers were less likely to find it on their local newsstand in the first place and were more likely to forget that it existed during the long wait between issues (and that two-month gap became a four-month gap if your newsstand under-ordered or if you skipped an issue).
Not surprisingly, Marvel moved Leonardi onto higher-profile books as soon as they thought he was ready for the big time, but that gave editor Carl Potts the opportunity to use the title as kind of a new talent showcase, a book where artists who were on their way toward becoming superstars could dig into fun stories on a low-pressure title that had two of the coolest-looking heroes of the eighties thanks to the brilliant design work of the ever-underappreciated Ed Hannigan.
The first fill-in issue, #5, was penciled by Terry Shoemaker, an artist with a fun, clear-line style that made him a perfect fit for character-driven titles like X-Factor, Legion of Superheroes, and a fun mid-eighties Marvel miniseries called Spellbound. June Brigman, co-creator of Marvel’s kid hero team Power Pack, had a similar artistic sensibility, and would close out the series with issue #11.
After Leonardi made one more visit to the series with issue #6, that’s when things got really interesting. I don’t know if Carl Potts had a Magic Eight Ball or a Cosmic Cube or just had the gift of prophecy, but buckle up for this one. The seventh issue of Cloak and Dagger was drawn by Marc Silvestri. He’d been drawing comics professionally for about five years then, but right after C&D, inked by Hall of Famer Terry Austin, Silvestri’s career went to the next level, and he’d find himself drawing the high-profile miniseries X-Men vs. Avengers, which led to a three-year stint on Uncanny X-Men during the height of its popularity, two years drawing the Wolverine solo title under writer Larry Hama, another peak period, which led to his departure from Marvel to co-found Image Comics.
The very next issue? Guest artist MIKE MIGNOLA. Same deal as Silvestri, a hard-working artist who’s had some success but hasn’t had his big breakout hit yet. Young Mignola shows a lot of promise here and really has fun with Cloak and his shadowy superpowers, and—recurring theme here—I'm sure he learned a lot from seeing what Terry Austin did with his pencil art. Less than a year later, Mignola was making steady inroads at DC Comics, with titles like Phantom Stranger leading him to the Superman titles, then the epic miniseries Cosmic Odyssey, which led to the game-changing Victorian Batman story Gotham by Gaslight, all of which led to the Hellboy-creating genius artist we all know and love today.
Could Carl Potts keep up that streak with issue #9? Art Adams, fresh off Longshot and between X-Men and New Mutants annuals says YES. Arguably the most in-demand artist of that era, just before the X-Men office would call permanent dibs on him, and he found time to fit an issue of a soon-to-be canceled superhero title into his busy schedule. We’re already pretty close to the “mature” Art Adams style here, but once again, Pott’s pitch of “want to draw two great-looking characters and have Terry Austin ink you?” was impossible to resist. (And check out D+D’s article on Art Adams’s Uncanny X-Men Annual #10 if you want to see where he went next.)
And the tenth issue, did Potts get that one right? Ask Bret Blevins! Another talented artist who’d been working steadily but hadn’t had that book yet that made everyone sit up and take notice of his talent. Cloak and Dagger battling Dr. Doom took care of that. The shadowy, mysterious Cloak and the tiny, skinny, basically naked but with a tight white costume technically outfitting her Dagger played to all of Blevins’s strengths, so it’s no surprise that he’d be tapped as the regular artist on their next ongoing title, Strange Tales, which would start up immediately after this volume of Cloak and Dagger came to an untimely end. Blevins would parlay that into a two-year stint on The New Mutants, which would lead to other fun titles include Sleepwalker for Marvel and Shadow of the Bat over at DC before he went on to storyboard some of the best animated cartoons of the ‘90s and 2000s including Superman, Batman Beyond, and Justice League. All roads lead back to Cloak and Dagger.
Wrapping up the series with the double-sized #11 would be the aforementioned June Brigman and, are you kidding me, Carl Potts? Larry Stroman. Another artist who’d been working hard to establish himself but hadn’t broken through quite yet. But around that time, while working with Potts on Alien Legion as part of Marvel’s creator-owned/adult Epic imprint, Stroman got really, really good and did it really, really fast. By 1988, he was drawing a Cloak and Dagger graphic novel, inked by Al Williamson (written by Mantlo and edited by Potts—again!), and he was already a hundred times better than he was during that 1987 fill-in comic. In 1991, he was tapped to draw Marvel’s X-Factor as part of a high-profile relaunch of the X-titles that would coincide with the debut of the multi-million-selling new X-Men series by Jim Lee and Chris Claremont. Stroman’s tenure on X-Factor was short-lived, and was followed up by an even shorter-lived Image Comics series called Tribe, but mention Stroman’s name to any comic book fan from Generation X and they’ll smile, give you a knowing look, then try to remember where they’ve tucked away those X-Factor comics.
So there you go. Rick Leonardi, Terry Shoemaker, Rick Leonardi again, Marc Silvestri, Mike Mignola, Art Adams, Bret Blevins, June Brigman, Larry Stroman, all on a regular bi-monthly, non-anthology title, doing their best to keep the little Spider-Man spin-off that could on schedule. The other life lessons that you’re going to need—don't do drugs, be nice to your kids, don’t get on Dr. Doom’s bad side—are all contained in the pages of Cloak and Dagger #1-11. My work here is done.
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