Cloak & Dagger #5: In My End Is My Beginning

I have a few things to say about this issue, but I’ll start with the most obvious: why on Earth are they sleeping in their costumes? I know that they’re on the run, but at some point on their journey they had enough time to stop and change their money into euros. They definitely had time to buy Tandy a sweatshirt or something, because she’s worn that leotard through a month of captivity and weeks of global hotel-hopping. Not even unstable molecules could save that suit from sweat-stank.

Aside from that dubious sartorial choice on the part of the artist, this issue worked well. It was deeply focused on the characters. Tandy is still trying to move on from being romantically entangled with Ty (she experienced a nice flare of jealousy when he mentioned his recent ex) while finally admitting that she wants to try to keep him in her life.

Ty, on the other hand, is being very good about confronting his own fears. When Tandy hints at his cowardice, he bristles at it, but he doesn’t get too defensive. He’s willing to stop malingering and at least attempt to face his past mistakes.

There was a lot of running in this issue. There’s a line from a T.S Elliot poem which reads, ‘In my end is my beginning’. The general thrust is that in order to understand yourself, and move forward with your life, you have to be willing to return to (and re-evaluate) the mistakes you made in your past. By going on the run (admittedly, in nicer style) they have, in a sense, returned to the identities they had when they were children. Now that they’re ready to face who they were, perhaps they can lay the psychopathic ghost who has been haunting them.

This quiet issue is building up to an explosive conclusion.