The Covenant

The comic does a pretty good job filling in all the missing pieces of backstory that the movie does not include. The comic follows the boys from when they inherit their first inkling of powers at 13 to the day before they go back to Spenser and the movie begins. It's not a bad story, gives a lot of background info on all the characters and is pretty creepy and foreshadows a lot in some spots if you are familiar with the movie. Despite the popular misconception, 'The Covenant' is not based on a novel, graphic novel or any comic-book title. The confusion comes from the fact that Sony had a comic-book of the same name created for the purposes of promoting the movie. Just prior to the release of this movie, Top Cow Comics printed a four part comic-book miniseries by Aron Coleite and Tone Rodriguez entitled The Covenant to help promote the movie.

I picked up this comic hoping that it would clear up some of the hanging plot threads from the movie, or at least be better than the movie. I was not dissapointed. The movie pretty much only resembled the comic in name & characters. Chase & Sarah were characters exclusive to the movie. Even the storyline was started from scratch. Sony has said that while this comic was put out as a promotional piece, it has nothing to do with the movie & is an individual story of it's own. The comic's storyline starts with four young children (Pogue, Miller, Reid, & Caleb) heading off for a summer at camp. While they are there they are terrorized by one of the councelors, Jambo & discover that they are descendants of a legendary group of warlocks. They had no previous knowledge of this, despite their teacher (Twoberry) claiming that their fathers went through the same things when they were kids. The children use their powers to punish Jambo by giving him the image of the camp's resident monster, the Woods Hole Warlock. Flash forward to their teen years & the four have to return to the summer camp in order to stop a menace that is mysteriously sucking the souls out of a few of the town's occupants. Once there they run into an old camp buddy & find that nothing is as it seems. Now the only thing that kept me from taking this book seriously at times was how it threw the image of the pentagram around. It is randomly inserted into the comic & the artist can't decide whether he wants it to be inverted (evil) or right side up (good). It's actually ironically done, since the first lines of the comic are about how overused & overmarketed the pentagram has become. There is often no explanation of why the pentagram was being used (or by whom). I assume that the inverted pentagram was to represent it being used by the "bad" character of the book, but since there is no explanation I'm not sure whether to blame it on a storyline oversight or the artist's mis-education. This kept me from seeing the comic as anything other than a good piece of marketing fluff.

This was the best graphic novel i have read so far. If you have ssen the movie the book fills in a lot of the blanks of the movie.