**NOTE: this was supposed to be a patreon exclusive, but patreon shit the bed as i was uploading it, making all the work i just did pointless. in order to salvage this, i’m just going to post this here for anyone to see. oh well. enjoy.

hi, i meant to write this yesterday but it was my boyfriend’s birthday so i spent it with him instead [everyone boos and throws solid objects at me] i know i know.

these characters are not going to be important enough to dedicate too much of your brain pan to. im not about to dump a bazillion new important randoms on the already big cast, but the process of creating characters within a fictional world involves conceptualizing what kind of people would organically emerge from those conditions. i end up having to create a bare bones back story in my head to feel like i can draw them correctly. i dont think that makes a lot of sense now that i think of it. i feel like people usually draw the character first and then come up with a story for them. i have to think of a character first and then think “what would this character look like, based on this dumb idea i had?”

this problem was amplified ten times when faced with having to populate maxine’s coven because the only people who would choose to practice a defunct means of (what is essentially) house cleaning would be the biggest freaks in the world. it’s like joining a club for churning butter.

anyway, i’ll tell you about the freaks from left to right, as they appeared in the most recent page:

note: most them dont have names and choosing them would just add another thing to agonize over forever until they’re perfect, so some will get nicknames.

  • name: rosa, after dona rosa who offers a really interesting look at an authentic limpia in ecuador
  • approx age: late 30s
  • practices?: white magic, as a curandera. less exotic than it sounds
  • bio: rosa is a butch lesbian who works as a dental assistant. a lot more people die there than you think. it’s always cheaper to have someone on already on staff who can take care of ghosts big and small, so, you know. it looks good on a resume. even if it means you have to close for the rest of the day to clean up all the unsterilized and unidentified liquids you spit all over a space where people lay with their mouths open.
  • her specialty: using cigarette smoke to purify a room. it’s called “multi-tasking”.

 

  • name: lorena, after this pep torres song. it fucking rips, it’s mexican surf rock
  • age: late teens
  • practices?: black magic. uses her own blood.
  • bio: lorena is all in on this witch shit. it’s more than just an aesthetic, which might be your first impression when she turns around and you see her wearing that one fucking “black flag” (or worse, the “unknown pleasures” album cover) shirt. oh great, you might think, another goth wanna-be here. every time school starts, these baby-bat kids start flooding in to your local morgues and funeral homes and covens looking to boost their credibility by hanging out with some real freaks…only to find an icy reception from an insular and secretive group that protects their own. eventually these posers drop out and find some other way to assert their credibility. lorena made the cut when she opened a vein for her fellow coven member with no hesitation. usually, they just, you know, wait to get to know you over a period of time. but whatever.

 

  • name: “mom”
  • age: late 30s, early 40s. lookin good girl!
  • practices?: white magic, kitchen witchery, specifically.
  • bio: her mother was in the gottwin coven when maxine’s grandmother ran the joint. now, she’s the day to day operator of the coven (with valdo, but he defers to her when it comes to anything involving magic or the coven itself) since maxine only shows up when she has to or needs to. she has no interest in taking over the coven officially since it’s already hard enough to be a PTA member AND a witch AND a den mother. that’s too many hats and this one is pointy enough.
  • she found witchcraft to be a less expensive, in the long run, way to keep the house clean of supernatural contamination. much in the same way that clipping coupons is good value even if it takes time to do it.

  • name: millie
  • age: late teens
  • practices: white magic, not well. trying her best.
  • bio: jeremy’s girlfriend. going to college and uses the coven as an excuse to see her boyfriend, who up until very recently was spending a lot of time working shitty jobs. brace face late in life. not really taking this too seriously but valdo likes her and thinks she’s a good kid.

 

  • name: “gordon”. as in freeman. read on.
  • age: mid-20s.
  • practices: he does not.
  • bio: a grad student studying covens and their functions in a modern society, he has been reluctantly allowed to hover and observe as long as his questions are not intrusive, he doesn’t take photos or video and he does not identify anyone in the coven. so far, has kept this up, possibly out of direct fear of retaliation from either valdo or maxine. as a note: every single grad student on planet earth looks like a gordon freeman clone. it’s fucked up and wrong and we should stop tolerating it.

 

  • name: “penny” for penanggalan
  • age: died in her late 20s, currently tipping 40 years old.
  • practices: law
  • bio: killed in a freak car power window accident, penny is the daughter of an immigrant mother/former coven member. having been brought to coven meetings as a child, penny feels a sense of familial comfort among those whom she grew up with and frequently visits to spend time people she ultimately feels the most comfortable with, despite her upward mobility in life. except uh, sometimes she does have to go upstairs if someone starts experimenting with an extermination technique. its not like they’ll accidentally exterminate her, but it wont feel good and she will make that known. studied hard and became a lawyer, much to her mother’s surprise and joy. she does not represent maxine often due to her being “career poison”.

 

  • name: albert
  • age: early 80s
  • practices: oh, a little of this. a little of that.
  • bio: albert is a hobbyist witch who has spent a long and storied career studying, discovering and fine-tuning some spells from difficult to decipher grimoires. while this never lead to any mind-blowing discoveries, he did make some significant enough to have his name appear in a few research papers and books. albert is one of those guys who will be like “ah, i can use this skill i learned from when i tamed lions in the circus when i deserted the french legion!” and you just have to take his word for it that he probably did that at some point…but its impossible to know if he’s bullshitting or not. legally blind. dont feel too sorry for him, he looked at a lunar eclipse.
  • “bea dont you mean solar eclipse” no i do not!!! you will read more in the coming pages about the MOON. im annoyed that lunar magic is already a thing that exists but everyone will think im just cribbing bloodborne. a hell of my own making.
  • currently attempting to make a major discovery before he dies by unlocking the secrets of alchemy using forbidden black magics. the thing is, alchemy is not real. but he’ll show them when he’s swimming in his scrooge mcduck gold vault

  • name: uh…m-mary? no that’s not it. it’s like uhh, japanese? shit. juri? maybe it was juri. ayami? wait! asami!…right?
  • age: uh did anyone get this from her? i dont think we asked
  • practices: definitely black magic.
  • bio: he’ll be sorry.

 

 

penny again. moving on.

 

 

  • name: fatima
  • age: just a little baby…
  • practices: only with adult supervision
  • bio: some kids are just born weird and develop an affinity for things that make absolutely no sense to their befuddled parents. these children might also have a difficult time connecting with other children without beating the absolute fucking shit out of them with their patented HULK HANDS. fatima’s parents are dealing with a certified weird child who has developed an all consuming interest in something that does not have an after school program or any mainstream means of indulging. plus it’s threatening to make her even MORE socially awkward than she already is; who wants to be friends with the kid obsessed with butter churning? valdo, having been a family friend since they moved into town (he’s friends with EVERYONE its SO annoying to jack and maxine) offered to babysit on coven nights. the diversity of mostly successful weirdos in the coven did much to assure fatima’s parents that she was in good hands. maxine had not attended that day. things might have been different if she had.

that’s all for now. there are some not pictured who are joke characters or just haven’t shown up yet. such as:

– a ghost learning white magic to sate his sexual masochism

-a living sex worker learning for the same reason, but as a niche dominatrix.

-a living woman who has “electromagnetic hypersensitivity” and claims to feels pain from the electro-magnetic pulse bombs used in commercial ghost extermination. this is not a thing.

-a man who has emblazoned his hat with the runes (WOMEN) (NEED) (SELF) / (WATER BEAST [bountiful]) (TERROR) (SELF)

-mervin, from the municipal government


well. ill see you soon. i have a page to draw and movie reviews to do. i finally thought of an angle for one of them. it was struggling with how to tackle it bc there was something i wanted to do with it but the framing of it all wasn’t coming together. this is incomprehensible, sorry. well. good night

3 thoughts on “The Coven: Quick character bios

  1. Red_Shirt_no2 says:

    Your efforts are noted & appreciated & these are hilarious and somehow… comforting? I am both comforted and disturbed by the fact that I am comforted…

  2. Luminous Lead says:

    “-a man who has emblazoned his hat with the runes ᛚᛗ (WOMEN) ᚾ (NEED)ᛗ (SELF) / ᛚᚢ (WATER BEAST [bountiful]) ᛁᛈ (TERROR) ᛗ (SELF)”

    I get that joke XD

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