The other Awesome comics: Coven

Welcome back to the ongoing feature where I read the other comics published by Awesome that ran alongside Supreme. I read them so you don't have to! (You don't have to thank me, but you should.)

After working with writer Jeph Loeb on Cable for Marvel, penciller Ian Churchill came to Awesome with the idea for a series. While the rest of the Awesome Universe focused on the super side of comics, the Coven would explore the mystic underworld of this universe.

Christina Baker, a young, plump African-American woman is our entry person point of view for the series. She's your average college student who happens to get headaches when supernatural occurrences are close by (I always assumed my headaches in college were from different causes, but maybe I just missed my chance to go on some poorly-plotted supernatural archeology adventures. Drat.)

She soon discovers two very supernatural people stealing from the university's museum: Scratch (a possessed priest) and Fantom (a French vampire). Both are members of the Coven. Soon, the evil Pentad show up and they sit down and talk reasonably about their differences. Oh, wait, no, they battle.

The leader of the Coven, Blackmass, soon arrives and recruits Christina to the world of magic and mysticism and explains how the Coven are trying to defend the world. He also explains that the Pentad are their evil counterparts.

There's another character, Spellcaster, who is a California surf girl who is also a white witch. When she sees her mother killed by a member of the Pentad, she vows revenge and works with the Coven to get it.

We follow the two groups as they collect artifacts that will allow the Pentad to resurrect Cain (of Cain and Abel) who will become the new king of men (just because).

(There must have been something in the water at the Awesome offices... perhaps holy water?... that so many series have to do with biblical references and angels and demons.)

Fortunately, Christina rejects the Pentad's offer to become a more powerful person and helps save the day. But before it ends, the leader of the Pentad mortally injures another member of the Pentad, who was secretly a spy and lover of Blackmass, even though we never knew about her or cared about their relationship.

Um...right.

Look, it's not a particularly good series. It's a bunch of characters who should be interesting, but aren't. We're not given a lot to care about them, we don't get to delve into their pasts any more than superficially and the most important thing is that we understand their powers.

The weird part is that they could have been interesting. Take Scratch. He's a priest who is partially possessed by a demon. That has potential. Instead, he's only shown to be a lecherous, wise-cracking, red-skinned devil. Who cares? We don't see any of the inner conflict. He's just another jokey miscreant in an artform littered with them. If he didn't have red skin, he could be Gambit. Meh.

One thing that struck me as I was reading this is that Jeph Loeb is a frustrating writer because he's so hit or miss. This is the same guy who found a way to make Fighting American distinct from Captain America. But he can't make this anything interesting?

I imagine that a lot of it has to do with his collaborators. My theory is that if Loeb got overpowered by his artist's ideas, the story just disappeared into mush. But if he had a good collaborator, as on the Rules of the Game miniseries or the first Kaboom series, the art and the story work together. (Way to go out on a limb Mike: When the artist and writer work well, the series work. Brilliant deduction!)

It's also hard to escape the problem of Churchill's art. He's clearly a gifted artist, but he can't help but draw his women mostly unclothed and they all start to look alike. That his main character is a plump African-American woman with blonde hair is about the most refreshing aspect, but just highlights his lack of discipline to draw any other woman as anything other than a nearly-naked supermodel.

It's exactly this base instinct that Alan Moore pushed so hard against in creating Suprema. By being a modest-looking, conservatively dressed young woman, she stood out from all the other Awesome characters, and most of the other women in comics in the 1990s. Just as Moore planned.

As long as we're talking production, I also can't decide about the garish pastel coloring with bright pinks, yellows and baby blues. It's clearly from the mid-90s and is kind of great for that, but man it's also too much.

Okay, back to the story. To be honest, once it got rid of the main Cain arc, the Coven got a little better, as the next arc was about a goblin infestation at a brothel. It's treated with humor and doesn't take itself too seriously. But as we still don't particularly care for the characters, this arc doesn't matter any more than the first.

There's also a recurring subplot about someone tracking down Christina, who on the last page of the first series, discovers some weird black cat woman we never see or gets mentioned again in any of the Awesome series.

The creators must have recognized that they were having characterization problems because they put out a one shot called Black and White (which seems to be the uninked pages from the later sort-of completed Dark Origins one-shot and a backup from one of the Lionheart issues... because it's Awesome, of course) in which we got short stories about three of the characters.

We got to see Christina care for the lost soul of a suicide victim. We got the origin of Scratch, which explained that the priest absorbed the demon within him so it couldn't get loose and do damage to the broader world (see, was that so hard?). And we got a dark story about the vampire, Fantom, herded into a Nazi concentration camp to be gassed, only to exact her revenge on the Nazis.

This last story was a little too similar to Magneto's origin form X-Men, but somehow that's only kind of a minor issue. Check out the page at right where he shows the starved, abused Jewish and other unwanted women herded into the gas shower stalls. They're all healthy, hot, beautiful women. Um... But at least they were trying to give us some reason to care for these character, which I guess is something.

A second series began in 1999 and crossed over with Supreme quite a bit, but I plan to save this for when we talk about Supreme: The Return. It's, for my money, the only interesting thing in the series that you might even want to consider trying to find.

From these nine or so issues, we got a spinoff called Lionheart, also by Churchill and Loeb, about a powerful heroine whose superpower must be keeping on one of the most ridiculously skimpy costumes! It's a bra with cutout pantyhose and arm-length gloves!

The short summary of Lionheart is that an archeologist comes across an artifact that lets her tap into half of the power God granted to humanity through the tree of knowledge (again, not what the Bible meant, but whatever). The other half is in the villain Blackheart, who immediately tries to kill Lionheart to get it all. The Coven get involved to help Lionheart, as does the archeologist's twin sister and Earnest Hemingway-inspired grandfather. There's no use getting too involved as the series lasted two issues and ended on a cliffhanger.

After Awesome collapsed for the final time, several of the characters were licensed out, including Coven, which then came out as a few miniseries by Avatar. (More on this when we get to Glory.)

Neither Loeb nor Churchill would work on these issues. Judging by their covers, I really don't want to even go through the motions of tracking them down, much less reading them. (Please don't make me.)

Churchill would go on to work for DC and Marvel after Awesome's collapse, drawing the "Code Red" story in Hulk and a spin-off of the Teen Titans. In 2010, he launched his creator-owned "Marineman," which received an Eisner nomination. So good for him.