Customer Reviews

Coyote Volume 1 (v. 1)

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Collected here are two storylines Steve Engelhart and Marshall Rogers (famous for their collaboration on DC's DETECTIVE a few years earlier) did at the very beginning of the 1980s for Eclipse Comics: COYOTE, a trickster character operating in the American Southwest, and SCORPIO ROSE, a 400 year-old gypsy witch working in Paris. Although both characters have turned out to be fairly longlasting (and pencilled by different artists than Rogers), there's a kind of fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants quality to both the stories here; the SCORPIO ROSE three-parter was never fully completed, and the third part (published for the first time here) is really just a summary of how the story would have ended with some additional layout pages by Mike Bair and others with very very rough finishes by Rogers. The impromptu nature of the storytelling means that it's hard to make much sense of either story; the plots seem made up as it goes along, and it doesn't have the kind of tightness of Engelhart and Rogers' work on Batman in DETECTIVE (or of Rogers and Roger Stern's superb work at about this time on DR. STRANGE). Yet it's worth getting just for Rogers's artwork, done at the peak of his abilities. His tight and careful layouts of cityscapes have almost never been equalled: there's a kind of texture to his work that I've never seen from another comics artist. (Disappointingly, this collection does not include his beautiful DOCTOR ORIENT back-up stories from the two issues of SCORPIO ROSE covered here.)