For me, there is a difference between awesome and cool. Pirates are awesome, Ninjas are cool. Sci-Fi is cool, Fantasy is awesome.
Magic seems to have the potential to fill either the cool or the awesome criteria for me, but generally lean towards awesome (fireballs are far more common than, say, waterbending-style magic). Undead skeletons seem to have the same, yet opposite effect, potential for either but usually end up being cool (i think it's numbers and type here. Smaller numbers of human skeletons are more prominent and cool, while legions of mixed skeleton types is scarce but tends to be awesome).
Interesting then, that someone (Derek Landy) decided to come up with an undead skeleton sorcerer detective as a main character for his books. Not only is he a skeleton sorcerer, but he is sarcastic, suave, sophisticated, shrewd intelligent and has a bloated ego. Along with that he is a practitioner of elemental magic, a master of several martial arts, carries a revolver at all times, and a sharp dresser. The fact that he is a brilliant detective (giving him a certain film-noire aura) adds to his coolness factor, and is the thing that tips him to be more cool than awesome, though he has enough of both to out-rank most other stuff/characters i know of in either category.
The left picture is official (on the cover of the first book), while the second is fanart (the URL gives credit to VanKid, so i will too)
