Strange Tales #18 (V2)

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The issue begins with Dagger briefly fighting the shadow beings as Night, Mr. Jip’s lackey, watches and laughs. Not far, Mr. Jip wonders how Cloak had managed to escape his magical bonds.

And far away from there, in Ohio, the young boy, Lamar Plotnick has summoned Cloak into a summoning circle, which Cloak discovers he can not escape from.

Back to Dagger, Night explains that she has the ability to extract darkness from people and use it to create being made of pure evil and shadow. She laughs and says that everyone has darkness inside of them; even someone composed of living light, and extracts the darkness from Dagger which looks strangely like a shadow cat. Without that darkness inside of her, her light powers begin to burn bright inside of her, even as Night has all the shadow beings form into a single beast of darkness. Dagger channels her light into a light sword and uses it to thrust through the beast, but Night seems unconcerned.

Back in Ohio, Cloak continues to plead with Lamar to free him so that he can go assist Dagger, but Lamar tells him to shush as they continue watching another episode of Goo-Gams (which is a nice reference back to the cartoon characters initially seen in the issues of Power Pack).

Back to Dagger, Night laughs and says that her mistake was extracting Dagger’s darkness; now she was going to return it – along with all the darkness she’d gathered from others. Dagger tries to fight it, but is soon overwhelmed and covered in darkness. Midnight teleports to Earth and calls X-Factor, reporting “an evil mutant.” X-Factor (who at this time consists of Cyclops, Jean Grey, Iceman, Beast and Angel) are called – but only Iceman, Beast and Jean Grey respond to the call and see an officer taken down by what appears to be a shadow dagger. They turn the corner and see Dagger – but her costume is all black, and she’s laughing at the idea that X-Factor thinks they’re any match for her. Night, in her scantly clad costume, watches and smiles.

(A note here says that Cloak & Dagger continues in their own series against X-Factor, but there’s one more issue of Strange Tales to be told, that’s related to the Cloak & Dagger cast of characters. The next Cloak & Dagger series is entitled: The Mutant Misadventures of Cloak & Dagger).