Tyrone "Ty" Johnson (Cloak) and Tandy Bowen (Dagger) met in New York City as runaways. Tyrone was a 17-year-old boy from Boston, Massachusetts with a debilitating stutter and ran away to New York City when his speech impediment prevented him from stopping his friend from stepping in front of a moving vehicle. Tandy was a 16-year-old girl from a privileged upbringing (born in Shaker Heights, Ohio) who ran away because her multi-millionaire supermodel mother was too busy with her career and social life to spend time with her daughter. When they met, Tyrone considered stealing Tandy's purse, only to be shamed when she kindly offered him money. A thief stole the purse and Tyrone retrieved it for her. Afterwards, they had dinner and became fast friends. When naïve Tandy accepted an offer of shelter from some strange men, wary Tyrone went along to protect her. The two teens were soon forcibly delivered to criminal chemist Simon Marshall developing a new synthetic heroin for Silvermane and the Maggia, testing it on runaway teens with fatal results. Johnson and Bowen somehow survived injections of the drug, and they fled. During their escape, the drug turned them into superpowered beings (this is later retconned that they were both actually mutants and that the drug had simply awakened their latent abilities). Tyrone found himself engulfed in darkness and seized by a strange hunger which eased in the presence of Tandy glowing with a brilliant light. Trying to hide his newly shadowy appearance in a makeshift cloak, Tyrone began absorbing Marshall's thugs into his darkness while Tandy struck them down with daggers of light. The two teens dubbed themselves "Cloak & Dagger" and declared war on drug crime in combating drug-dealers and helping runaway children.