Marvel’s Cloak and Dagger is coming to Freeform this June, but don’t be fooled by the fact that the network formerly known as ABC Family is airing this paired superhero show. Although the series doesn’t reach Netflix levels of adult content, the series was created by Joe Pokaski, the Daredevil executive producer who famously wrote the episode in which Fisk uses a car door in a brutal and fatal fashion. As Cloak and Dagger depicts the origin story of Tyrone Johnson (Aubrey Joseph) as “Cloak” and Tandy Bowen (Olivia Holt) as “Dagger” gaining their powers, the tale will be told in a manner unlike any other comic-based show on cable, network television, or streaming service.

“I don’t really think in terms of target audience,” explains Pokaski. “I’ll be angry if there aren’t 50-year-old men watching this show. I’m hoping a lot of people that go to the Marvel brand go to Cloak and Dagger… We don’t try to be too gratuitous, but we want to sell the world as a place that needs superheroes, particularly New Orleans. And both Marvel and Freeform have been completely on board with how real and how gritty we want to do it… there wasn’t a single thing in Cloak and Dagger where I tried to push the envelope where anyone brushed me off the plate.”

The series has the extra challenge of reinventing the original comic which contains somewhat dated views of the lives of teenagers with regard to race and gender. “The most important thing is you definitely have to have a different approach,” Pokaski says. “For starters, you try to find actors who don’t look like what you’ve seen before, and I think that’s why I was drawn to Tandy and Tyrone. They were young; one was a young white woman; one was a young black man, and they were thrown in together. They needed each other, and there’s something interesting in terms of the fact that they’ve got a parity and a yin and a yang that I don’t think you see in a lot of superheroes. There’s usually a power dynamic; there’s usually a sidekick. And these two need each other and are equals to each other.”

The stories of Tyrone and Tandy will be told in tandem with a reversal of stereotypes as Tyrone goes from the streets as a kid to private school in his teens and as Tandy goes from taking ballet lessons to living in an abandoned church, but their back stories are filled with tragedy and far from dull. “The idea is just to tell the most exciting part, and I think one of the things we found very early is that the intercut allowed us to do that,” Pokaski elaborates. “So while you were sort of doing a slow bake in a personal story, when you’re intercutting, for example, between Tandy robbing a house and Tyrone at a basketball game, you can add some excitement and use a shorthand that allows you to move it along but really stay intimate and small as well.”