The story of Coyote moves forward fast, as the son of the totem gets past his heartbreak by moving into a swinging singles complex in Las Vegas. Revenge scents in the desert air as he gets a job working for the mob, which works for the Shadow Cabinet. And he has his first run-in with the Djinn, a Middle eastern crime lord we'll see plenty more of. But best of all, he meets two sisters who will change his life in ways even the Trickster could never imagine.
Steve Englehart went to Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut. After a stint in the Army, he moved to New York and began to write for Marvel Comics. That led to long runs on Captain America, The Hulk, The Avengers, Dr. Strange, and a dozen other titles. Midway through that period he moved to California (where he remains), and met and married his wife Terry.
He was finally hired away from Marvel by DC Comics, to be their lead writer and revamp their core characters (Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Flash, and Green Lantern). He did, but he also wrote a solo Batman series (immediately dubbed the "definitive" version) that later became Warner Brothers' first Batman film (the good one).
After that he left comics for a time, traveled in Europe for a year, wrote a novel (The Point Man™), and came back to design video games for Atari (E.T., Garfield). But he still liked comics, so he created Coyote™, which within its first year was rated one of America's ten best series. Other projects he owned (Scorpio Rose™, The Djinn™) were mixed with company series (Green Lantern [with Joe Staton], Silver Surfer, Fantastic Four). Meanwhile, he continued his game design for Activision, Electronic Arts, Sega, and Brøderbund.
And once he and Terry had their two sons, Alex and Eric, he naturally told them stories. Rustle's Christmas Adventure was first devised for them. He went on to add a run of mid-grade books to his bibliography, including the DNAgers™ adventure series, and Countdown to Flight, a biography of the Wright brothers selected by NASA as the basis for their school curriculum on the invention of the airplane.
In 1992 Steve was asked to co-create a comics pantheon called the Ultraverse. One of his contributions, The Night Man, became not only a successful comics series, but also a television show. That led to more Hollywood work, including animated series such as Street Fighter, GI Joe, and Team Atlantis for Disney.
Weird, heady stuff. Now we can see what Englehart wants to do with Coyote, and it's not really a super-hero book, it's more of a urban fantasy about clashing religions. Not sure if it's good, but I like it! The Islamic villain Djinn is very dated.
The second volume in this eighties creator-owned series has Coyote (a mystical shapeshifter) trying to figure out his connection if any, to Coyote the Indian spirit, while battling the sinister Shadow Cabinet and getting not one but two girls. Fun, but loses points for the stock Islamic Terrorist types thrown in as added villains.
Crazy fun story about a native American demi-god, who leaves the desert and ends up in man's world.
It gets complicated, as 'man's world' is Las Vegas and he immediately gets involved with a pair of sisters who may be up to something, the mob, an international conspiracy and eventually aliens.
This was one of the comics that lured me away from the big two and got me into independent comics.