James Hodgkins (1)

I was showing some friends the art in Sandman and I got in the mood for some of that mythology. I didn't feel like lugging around my Absolute Sandman, so I decided to try out Lucifer.
I borrowed this copy from my usual book dealers (I have a couple of friends I trade books with, but I'm usually in the borrowing end of the trade), and I think I will borrow the rest. It's not Sandman, somehow it lacks a sense of something bigger that I always feel when I read Sandman (the fact that I'm reading show more the Absolute versions with its lustrous paper and recoloring might help that feeling).
But it still is a really nice story (2 actually). I liked the first arc better, in some ways it sounded more like Gaiman's Lucifer. In the second arc Lucifer was a bit more deceptive but also a bit more passive, bidding his time, waiting for Fate, while on the first arc he actually went on a quest. show less

Since we last saw Lucifer in Murder Mysteries, mulling over the injustice of the Lord, some 13 billion years have passed. More than that if Murder Mysteries takes place before the creation of the universe, which it probably does. Since then, Lucifer has rebelled against the Lord, been consigned to Hell, given up Hell (its dominion passing into the hands of a pair of angels), and set up in a piano bar in L.A. because, you know, what else would you do? His former consort, Mazikeen, works there show more with him.

And he'd probably be there, enjoying himself just fine, if Amendiel, an angel himself, didn't pop into Lucifer's bar, Lux, from the Silver City to ask Lucifer to undertake a mission that the Lord can't be seen to directly intervene in. In "The Morningstar Option," someone's granting wishes, or something. It's all very vague and cosmological. Lucifer recruits a human girl who tied into the phenomenon and strikes out to put a stop to it. The story actually reminded me a lot of "The Thessaliad" in The Sandman Presents: Taller Tales in that Lucifer, like Thessaly, knows the ways these kinds of stories work, and therefore undertakes the story in line with the way it should go.

In the second story here, "A Six-Card Spread," Lucifer heads off the Germany to get another former angel to read some cards for him. Of course, there's trouble afoot, what with a bunch of racist thugs running around and the cards themselves gaining intelligence. And Lucifer's not the only person after them... (Who would have guessed that?)

In both good and bad ways, these remind me of the early Sandman stories. There are big, neat ideas being played with. But there's also a protagonist for whom no problem ever seems to exist. As in the Sandman stories, I found myself focusing on the minor mortal characters, because they had lives and problems and such. Lucifer only has smugness, and that works much of the time... but not all of it. I found "The Morningstar Option" more interesting, but "A Six-Card Spread" got bogged down in all the mythology of the cards, which I didn't find very interesting. Part of the problem (again, like early Sandman) is that the story often doesn't seem to operate by rules the reader is aware of. Lucifer and all the myriad demons do things when they need to, and that is that.

The villains of "The Morningstar Option" bothered me, in that they were gods from before our universe or something... but that didn't really matter. They could have been wish-granting Star Trek space aliens for all the difference it made to the story being told. Just saying "gods" didn't do a whole lot to make the story different.

The book ends with a short story, "Born with the Dead," about a girl whose dead grandmothers give her advice, which comes in handy when her best friend is murdered. I liked it a lot, probably for the same reason I liked a lot of the Sandman fill-in stories-- it had a protagonist I could identify with. Lucifer's here, but it's a small bit at the end.

Last time I read a Mike Carey take on a Sandman spin-off, I got the excellent The Furies. So far, this isn't bad, but it's no rival either.

Lucifer: « Previous in sequence | Next in sequence » show less

I recently reread Sandman, and while I do love it for its own sake, I must confess that my real reason for trekking through Gaiman's epic was to get to Carey's equally majestic, albeit much-less praised, story. Frankly, I'm not sure why that is, as in many ways, I think Lucifer surpasses its origin story. Both boast rich, and mostly independent cosmologies, but whereas for a significant part of its run, Sandman exists as a framework for Gaiman to write any kind of story he wants, Lucifer is show more surprisingly single-minded in telling the tale of the title character's most recent war against his creator. And frankly, I'd rather read about cunning, crafy, cold, cruel Lucifer than mopey Morpheus.

Volume one does little more than establish the setup for the rest of the series. Lucifer gets his Macguffin, and we meet the Basanos and Elaine. Sadly, Mazikeen gets short-shrift, but it's hard to do much with a character who can only barely be understood. But mostly, this book exists so that we can see what a brilliant bastard Lucifer can be. show less

This is volume one of the Lucifer spin-off from Gaiman's Sandman series. I was a little apprehensive about reading a series focusing on one of my favourite characters which wasn't written by Gaiman, but I needn't have worried. This was well-written, and full of Lucifer being cool and witty while running a piano-bar in LA. The artwork is pretty, and I even prefer it to a lot of the artwork that featured in Sandman. The last story felt a little out of place - maybe due to its shortness, and show more the comparative lack of the title character. Still, well worth the read; and as with most things, I presume it will kick into gear fully in the next volume. show less