Thursday, July 28, 2005

Lucifer – Devil in the Gateway

by Mike Carey

This is the first collection in a spin-off comic series from Neil Gaiman's Sandman. It's taken a while for me to check it out, since the character of Lucifer in the Sandman books never seemed interesting to me, but other places around the booklogosphere have been giving it the thumbs up so I figured it was past time I gave it a chance.

Like the Hellblazer collection I also read recently, Lucifer tries a little too hard to emulate its progenitor series. The Sandman has a theme of reality being determined by dreams, which makes perfect sense, considering its protagonist is the king of dreams. When they bring up the same idea in Lucifer, it doesn't really fit. Secondly, one of the clever things about the Sandman is how the story reused characters from past plotlines that you thought were out of the story forever, and did so in a way that tied all the threads together elegantly. Even at the end of the first collection it's obvious that Lucifer is going for the same trick, which is not a good thing since the clever thing about the way Gaiman did it in Sandman was that these old plotlines kept popping up unexpectedly.

But Lucifer has a lot going for it too. Despite not being engaged by Lucifer's character in Sandman (this is the biblical Satan we're talking about, by the way) he turns out to be a pretty entertaining protagonist. In the Sandman we learn that Lucifer isn't all that evil, but this is still the guy who was in charge of torturing people in Hell for aons so he's not exactly a nice guy. It's fun to watch him callously use the people around him and ruthlessly punish those who get in his way.

This collection contains two seperate stories, each of which does little more than set up a larger overarching plot. In the first, Lucifer (who in the Sandman story retired as lord of hell) is asked by God to take care of a spate of irresponsible wish-granting on Earth. Along the way we get a reiteration of some ideas taken out of Sandman, as well as some cool new ones, plus we get to see Lucifer taking advantage of his companions and showing off his cool powers. In the second, worried by events of the first story, he attempts to consult the tarot, which for him has to be the original tarot, a bunch of malicious anthropomorphic representations of the cards.

It's a pretty good read, I'm glad I tried this series out.

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