Dave's ASH Archive - Coherent Super Stories

Last Updated: 9/15/23

CSS Special #3 added.

From left to right: Dragonfly, Ladyhawke, Brightsword, Fantom.

Originally conceived as a "reprint" series along the lines of Marvel Triple Action, although the stories are actually new. Meant to cover stories from the 20th Century, although it sometimes drifts into the 19th or 21st. Often toys with odd presentation tricks, such as script-style, or other elements of media. Later on it became dominated by stories written for the High Concept Challenge on RACC. Written by Dave Van Domelen.

Featuring Dragonfly: Set in the early 1970s, this arc fleshes out the Second Heroic Age.
1. Taking Flight: Introducing Dragonfly and Ladyhawke, and how their careers and fates are intertwined with that of the mad robot Antiochus V!
2. The View From Here: Snapshots from the high times of the Second Heroic Age, with guest appearances by Powerhouse, Don Quixote, Delta Rose, the Fantom, Brightsword and the original Lady Lawful!
3. Turbulence: The Second Heroic Age didn't officially end until 1976, but most people will point to the end of October 1975 as what hastened its end...and Dragonfly was right in the middle of it!
4. Hard Landing: Things look bad for the end of the Second Heroic Age...but is history fixed in stone, or can it be changed? Either way, Dragonfly's not getting out of this one unscathed! (Note: after you read this, go read Time Capsules #10 for the other side of the story!)
One-shot:
1. "Lighting the Torch" featuring Brightsword and Jiang Sheng: Set at the dawn of the Second Heroic Age, this story is written in full script format. Brightsword has his origin story, while Jiang Sheng opposes the schemes of his father, the insidious Dr. Huang Sheng!
The End Times: A series of stories set on or around July 6, 1998, featuring characters who had been active in the Second Heroic Age.
1. "Immortal Evil" featuring Jiang Sheng: Having retired to a life of monastic contemplation under San Francisco, Jiang finds that even when you don't go looking for trouble it tends to find you, and some family ties can never be broken.
2. "Drifter" featuring Chuck Morse: The former "Weapons Master" gets in over his head in the Cascade Mountains on the last day of the Third Heroic Age.
3. "Reunion" featuring Ladyhawke: At last, the creation of the Barrier as seen by one of the people who gave their lives to make it!
Invading The First Age:
- Mega-Sized Coherent Super Stories #1 - "Gilded Age" featuring the Freedom Alliance: In the vein of Roy Thomas and Gerry Conway, the First Heroic Age as seen through the eyes of the Second! The true origins of Johnny Angel, the Gauntlet, Centurion and the enigmatic Minuteman!
1. "The Secret Origins of Lady Lawful" featuring Lady Lawful I and II: Spanning the First and Third Heroic Ages, the first outings of both Ladies Lawful are revealed, finishing off the origins of the classic Freedom Alliance lineup! By guest writer Andy Burton.
2. "Aunt Jane's Bible" featuring Red Widow: It's 1946, the First Heroic Age is winding down, and a flash-in-the-pan retired Mysterywoman gets sucked back into the life by, of all things, a bit of filthy "fan fiction"....
3. "Minutes of the Man" featuring Minuteman and Black Opal: It's 1938. It's 1983. Two men put on the same mask in order to protect the weak, but their motivations and experiences are rather different.
Tales of the Weird West featuring White Hat:
1. "Legend of the White Hat": To most people, the White Hat was just a second-string movie hero, but what if there was an element of truth to his tale? And how far can a dead man's cries for vengeance carry you?
2. "The Murders on Main Street": White Hat meets the weird Newton Sisters in Laramie while on the trail of one of Abe's killers, and finds his strangest foe yet!
Brightsword Family Misadventures:
1. "The Idiot Plot" featuring Brightsword I: Presenting the original script for the lead story of Brightsword #26 (November 1970), can Brightsword's strong arm and flashing blade help him stop a plot to scramble the brains of America's atomic scientists?
2. "Mixed Media" featuring Brightsword II: One blond female patriotic hero finds herself in the stomping grounds of another, and discovers that maybe Chicago isn't even a nice place to VISIT.
Before There Were Blogs:
1. "Confessions of a D-Lister" featuring...a D-Lister: In a somewhat rambling missive to posterity, a D-list paranormal leaves a warning to those who might dismiss people like him.
2. "Dear Diary" featuring the Forgotten Man: A reprint of a 1930s pulp story written in the form of diary entries in which a woman encounters that most mysterious of mysterymen...the Forgotten Man! Written for High Concept Challenge #1.
3. Coherent Super Stories #18 - "The Black Buddha of Bhutan" featuring Jack of All Trades: Jack Ripley's travels in search of the odd and unexplained have taken him to an obscure corner of China where darkness dwells.... Winner of High Concept Challenge #4 and the "Favorite Single Issue" RACCie!
More Flummoxed Flagsuits
1. Coherent Super Stories #19 - "IMP in the ARPANET" featuring Brightsword I: Why is Brightsword swimming through a sea of daffodils, what is that chocolate bar he's carrying for, and will any of this get Brightsword closer to answering the mystery of his origins? Featuring the script of the lead story from Brightsword #21, June 1970, and winner of High Concept Challenge #6.
2. Coherent Super Stories #20 - "Flag Line" featuring Rechtigkeit II: When "flagsuits" clash, it's often global politics in microcosm, but what if one of them isn't an official representative of her government and the other is more interested in making love rather than war? Might that be even more like global politics than usual, come to think of it? Written for High Concept Challenge #8.
3. Coherent Super Stories #21 - "Prisoner of the Red Planet!" featuring Brightsword I: Darkshield's finally found a way to get Brightsword out of his hair for good...or has he? Written for High Concept Challenge #9.
Concepts That Must Be High
1. Coherent Super Stories #22 - "In Vivo, Veritas" featuring Balder: When you're a superhuman, you just don't get colds or the flu, so it takes something rather more potent to put you under the weather. Winner of High Concept Challenge #12.
2. Coherent Super Stories #23 - "Device Not Found" featuring LU-62: When you're not even organic, human diseases aren't a concern. But you get your own set of maladies, and sometimes there's nothing you can do but crash. Also written for High Concept Challenge #12, but later withdrawn from consideration for voting.
3. Coherent Super Stories #24 - "Rebirth Part 4" featuring Warendja: Part of the 1988 relaunch of Coherent Comics, will the animal totem powers of Warendja be enough to let him save "Babs" from a dark mage? Co-winner of High Concept Challenge #14 (ties crop up a lot when the voting pool is in the single digits).
4. Coherent Super Stories #25 - "The Sod Men" featuring White Hat: In the early 1980s, it was mistakenly thought that the White Hat had passed into the public domain, and a British publisher created a short-lived weekly featuring comics and text pieces about him, pseudonymously written by Bart Stone. Fandom rumor has it that Alan Moore wrote at least some of these stories, and could this tale of prairie zombies be one of them? Written for High Concept Challenge #17.
5. Coherent Super Stories #26 - "Pitch Reel" featuring Brighthorn: The Department of Super-Human Affairs makes a lot of money from licensing the likenesses of registered superheroes, but we don't often get to see the nuts and bolts of this. And that's probably for the best. Written for High Concept Challenge #18.
6. Coherent Super Stories #27 - "Secret of the Silver Skull" featuring the Silver Skull: A fossil hunter in Egypt has found a silvery skull that looks like it might have belonged to a new species of dinosaur, but the more people study it, the more impossible the skull seems to be! Written for High Concept Challenge #19, but I goofed on the premise (which was supposed to involve a silver skull machine, not just a silver skull).
7. Coherent Super Stories #28 - "Thirty Years of Jenny!" featuring the Jenny Doll: A text piece from 1989's "Jenny's Jobs #1" from Coherent Comics, outlining the history of the world's most famous fashion doll! Not written for a High Concept Challenge, but a pretty high concept anyway.
8. Coherent Super Stories #29 - "Leftovers" featuring Iguana Jack: A little more than two years after almost all of the superhumans vanished from the face of the Earth, can an abandoned alien bioweapon and a former FBI agent handle a rampaging mystic beast intent on destroying Cleveland? Winner of High Concept Challenge #31, "Big Monster Battle!"
9. Coherent Super Stories #30 - "Alley Abroad" featuring Alistair Dorchester: By 1922, the Wild West isn't all that wild anymore, but that's not stopping lovable upper class British twit Alistair Dorchester from trying to experience it! Guest-starring the White Hat. Written for High Concept Challenge #33, "Neo-Edwardian Comedy of Manners and/or Christian Rapture".
10. Coherent Super Stories #31 - "Dichotomous Duo" featuring Flower Power and Union Label: A three-page origin story feature intended as filler in various early 1970s Coherent Comics. Written for High Concept Challenge #36.5, "One Minute Origin Story".
11. Coherent Super Stories #32 - "Making Contract" featuring Terra-Soar and Doctor Developer: A collaboration between Dave Van Domelen and Andrew Burton, showing a vignette from Doctor Developer's final months in Detroit. Winner of High Concept Challenge #37, "Collaboration".
12. Coherent Super Stories #33 - "Un Chien Androide": Written for High Concept Challenge #39, "Movie Mashup," in which I blended Pacific Rim, Mr. Peabody and Sherman, and Un Chien Andalou. Yyyyeah.
13. Coherent Super Stories #34 - "Mappa Mundi": Written for High Concept Challenge #43, "The Eruption of the Fantastic into the Mundane" (yeah, a few challenges in a row didn't inspire me). Not every world affected by the events of July 6, 1998 was that different from what we consider to be the Real World. Here's a story from one of those worlds.
14. Coherent Super Stories #35 - "SPIRIT of the Lake": Winner of High Concept Challenge #47, "Team Up". A tale of one of SPIRIT's early cases in 2014, in which then-Captain Hendrick teams up with someone no one expected to see again.
15. Coherent Super Stories #36 - "Time Critical Mission": Written for High Concept Challenge #49, "Slice of Life". Set during the height of the Godmarket...sort of. And featuring Paladin, who never actually existed...sort of.
16. Coherent Super Stories #37 - "Louie and the CU-Ts": Written for High Concept Challenge #54, "Neon Talking Super Street Bat-Luge". In 1994, LU-62 agrees to do a little advertising work. It's good PR, no potential downsides, right?
That Wacky Publisher
1. Coherent Super Stories #38 - "License To Nil": Not written for any High Concept Challenge, but still a pretty high concept. The 1970s were full of weird licensed comics, so why should the counterfactual Coherent Comics be any different? Featuring Henry Stanley Seagull.
2. Coherent Super Stories #39 - "Dead Stars": A 1950s SF short story bought for a possible new magazine in the 1970s, but when the market collapsed it was used as a backup piece. A deliberate attempt to write a 50s-style "Clever Idea" story. Featuring the Great Work.
(No theme...yet, anyway.)
1. Coherent Super Stories #40 - Until The End Of Tym: A drabble (100 words exactly) set in the instant before the Barrier went up, as Tymythy Twystyd has an epiphany (epyphyny?).
2. Coherent Super Stories #41 - PSA: Someone's got to think about the poor IP lawyers....

Counterfictional Specials

A lot of the stories above involve alternate timelines, or stories not really set in ASH at all but "published" by the fictional Coherent Comics company and its predecessors. The stories below, however, bend that metafiction to the breaking point and say, "These were never actually published by Coherent Comics," on top of not being part of ASH continuity. This section is kicking off with "rejected proposal" stories, but I suppose Coherent Super Stories Specials in the future could also involve in-setting fanfic and other metafictional weirdness. Oh, and I'm not aware of anyone else using the term "counterfictional," but I extended it from the SF/F genre of "counterfactual" ("What If history happened differently?" sort of things), except that it's fictional history being tweaked.

Coherent Super Stories Special #1 - Cameryn By Any Other Name: A double- or even triple-length "Untold Story" that suggests an entirely different way the Coherent Comics universe could have rebooted in 1998, in the tradition of late 80s and 90s DC Comics mega-events!
Coherent Super Stories Special #2 - Home Again, Gain A Home: More "untold" content, continuing the story started in CSS Special #1. There's really no such thing as truly "retired" for people in the cape community....
Coherent Super Stories Special #3 - Building Bonds, Taking Stock: Cammy McKay deals with social alienation by building a robot, taking after her father in that respect. But she's not done taking after her mother....

ASH Titles Archive