Coventry is an unfinished Fantagraphics comic book series by Bill Willingham. Coventry is a fictitious state in an alternate history version of the United States of America in which magical and legendary powers, creatures, villains and heroes are real and a part of everyday life. Coventry ran for only 3 issues, from November 1996 to July 1997. Two short novels set in the same universe, detailing the exploits of the legendary hero Beowulf, were written by Willingham and published by Clockwork Storybook in 2002.
Fantagraphics Books is an American publisher of alternative comics, classic comic strip anthologies, magazines, graphic novels, and the erotic Eros Comix imprint. Many notable cartoonists publish their work through Fantagraphics, including Jessica Abel, Peter Bagge, Ivan Brunetti, Charles Burns, Daniel Clowes, Mary Fleener, Roberta Gregory, Joe Sacco, Chris Ware, and the Hernandez brothers.
William "Bill" Willingham is an American writer and artist of comics, known for his work on the series Elementals and Fables.
A fictional country is a country that is made up for fictional stories, and does not exist in real life, or one that people believe in without proof. Sailors have always mistaken low clouds for land masses, and in later times this was given the name Dutch capes. Other fictional lands appear most commonly as settings or subjects of myth, literature, film, or video games. They may also be used for technical reasons in actual reality for use in the development of specifications, such as the fictional country of Bookland, which is used to allow EAN "country" codes 978 and 979 to be used for ISBN numbers assigned to books, and code 977 to be assigned for use for ISSN numbers on magazines and other periodicals. Also, the ISO 3166 country code "ZZ" is reserved as a fictional country code,.
The Coventry comics and the following novels have been praised by critics as "a delicious blend of horror, offbeat humor, great characters and cat-and-mouse plotting" and "sharp, stark and needle-point powerful".
Coventry may have served as a prototype[citation needed] for Willingham's later series, Fables (published by DC Comics, under the Vertigo imprint), which deals with various characters from fairy tales and folklore who have been forced out of their Homelands by a mysterious enemy known as the Adversary.
A prototype is an early sample, model, or release of a product built to test a concept or process or to act as a thing to be replicated or learned from. It is a term used in a variety of contexts, including semantics, design, electronics, and software programming. A prototype is generally used to evaluate a new design to enhance precision by system analysts and users. Prototyping serves to provide specifications for a real, working system rather than a theoretical one. In some design workflow models, creating a prototype is the step between the formalization and the evaluation of an idea.
DC Comics, Inc. is an American comic book publisher. It is the publishing unit of DC Entertainment, a subsidiary of Warner Bros. since 1967. DC Comics is one of the largest and oldest American comic book companies, and produces material featuring numerous culturally iconic heroic characters including: Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman, The Flash, Green Lantern, Martian Manhunter, Nightwing, Green Arrow, Aquaman, Hawkman, Cyborg and Supergirl.
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