While best known for his association with Dagger (Tandy Bowen), Cloak is still a force to be reckoned with on his own. Gifted with teleportation and intangibility, Cloak has access to the “Darkforce Dimension,” a world of strange ebony energy. While formidable alone, Cloak’s relationship with Dagger makes the team nearly unstoppable.
As the results of an experiment gone awry, Tyrone and Tandy are two heroes cut from the same cloth. Tandy’s presence keeps Tyrone’s own darkness and hunger for human life at bay. This makes their relationship not only a working one, but an essential one that runs beyond friendship and love.
Escape Into the Darkness
Raised in a poor South Boston neighborhood, Tyrone Johnson was a good student despite his chronic stutter, which he struggled to correct with the support of his best friend Billy. When Tyrone was seventeen, he and Billy witnessed the robbery of a local store and the fatal shooting of its clerk. The thieves fled, and Billy ran as well, fearing that he and Tyrone might be wrongly suspected of the crime. When a policeman ordered Billy to stop, Tyrone tried to proclaim Billy’s innocence. His stutter made it too hard for him to speak clearly, and the officer shot Billy dead. Feeling responsible for Billy’s death and afraid of the police, Johnson ran away to New York City.
Upon arriving at Manhattan’s Port Authority Bus Terminal, a penniless Tyrone considered robbing Tandy Bowen, a rich girl who also ran away from home. But when someone else robbed her first, Tyrone impulsively tackled the thief and returned Tandy’s purse. The two teens became fast friends. When the naïve Tandy accepted an offer of shelter from some strange men, a wary Tyrone went along to protect her. The two teens were soon forcibly delivered to criminal chemist Simon Marshall, who was developing a new synthetic heroin for the Maggia and testing it on runaway teens with fatal results.