Lucifer (comics)

AUTHOR: Carey, Mike

ARTIST: Peter Gross (illustrator); Scott Hampton (illustrator); Jon J. Muth (illustrator); Dean Ormston (illustrator); P. Craig Russell (illustrator); Kelly Ryan (illustrator); Chris Weston (illustrator); Daniel Vozzo (colorist); Ellie De Ville (letterer); Jared K. Fletcher (letterer); Todd Klein (letterer); Duncan Fegredo (cover artist); Michael Wm. Kaluta (cover artist); Christopher Moeller (cover artist)

PUBLISHER: DC Comics

FIRST SERIAL PUBLICATION: 2000-2006

FIRST BOOK PUBLICATION: 2001-2007

Publication History

Lucifer, the primary protagonist of Lucifer, was created by Neil Gaiman and Sam Kieth and first appeared in The Sandman, issue 4, published by DC Comics in 1989 (collected in The Sandman: Preludes and Nocturnes, 1989). The character was further developed by Gaiman in The Sandman, issues 21-28, published between 1990 and 1991 (collected in The Sandman: Season of Mists, 1992). After Gaiman’s The Sandman series ended in 1996, DC’s Vertigo imprint sought to capitalize on its popularity by publishing a spin-off miniseries under the title The Sandman Presents.

In 1998, Vertigo editor Alisa Kwitney asked Mike Carey to submit a pitch for a Lucifer story line to lead off The Sandman Presents line. Despite his lack of experience with the major publishers, Carey was ultimately made series writer. With Carey in place, Lucifer began as a three-issue miniseries, The Sandman Presents, in March, 1999. In June of 2000, it was released as its own ongoing series (each issue averaging twenty-two pages) under the Vertigo imprint. For the first few issues of this new series, it continued to be marketed as a The Sandman spin-off, but by issue 5 it had begun to chart its own course, as Carey developed his own distinct storytelling style. In 2001, the series received five Eisner Award nominations, cementing its popularity. A year later, Carey was signed on to an exclusive contract with DC. The series ended with issue 75.

Plot

Lucifer is a spin-off from DC’s popular The Sandman, a horror-fantasy series targeted at mature audiences. Lucifer’s title character, as well as many of its supporting characters, originally debuted in the earlier series. Though familiarity with The Sandman is not a prerequisite for reading Lucifer, the latter’s initial setup may be difficult for readers to follow without some knowledge of the Season of Mists volume of The Sandman. In that volume, Lucifer abdicates his throne in hell, passing his rule to Dream, who in turn passes it on to Remiel and Dumas, two of Heaven’s angels. The first volume of Lucifer, set sometime after these events, reintroduces the reader to Lucifer, who in his retirement has opened a Los Angeles piano bar named Lux, which he runs with the help of Mazikeen, from Season of Mists.

Lucifer features a highly complicated story line, in which seemingly insignificant events and characters end up assuming great importance as the story progresses. Though the series is broken into discrete stories, these tales frequently depend upon characters and plot details introduced in earlier stories, thus rendering the series difficult to follow without reading forward chronologically from the first volume. Readers may encounter further difficulties, as Lucifer occasionally imports characters from other series (such as The Sandman and The Dreaming), with which it assumes the reader is familiar. Because of the plot’s complexity, the series is also largely devoid of embedded recaps; readers are thus tasked with keeping track of the characters and plot themselves.

Despite Lucifer’s complexity, a rudimentary plot summary is possible. In Devil in the Gateway, Lucifer receives from God a letter of passage granting him exit from God’s creation. Wary that the letter might be a trap, he travels to Berlin in search of the Basanos, a sentient deck of tarot cards controlled by its creator, an angel named Meleos. By the time Lucifer finds the cards, the Basanos have escaped from Meleos and taken a human host, Jill Presto. With host in tow, they inform Lucifer that the letter is, in its current form, rigged to bar its user reentry to creation. Warned of God’s plan, Lucifer transforms the letter into a portal, which he later multiplies and distributes across all the realms and dimensions of creation.

In Children and Monsters, Lucifer and Elaine Belloc, a human-angel hybrid, rescue the angel Michael from an evil angel named Sandalphon, who has been using Michael to produce an artificial race of angelic children. Fatally injured during the rescue, Michael “dies” on the other side of the portal, thus imbuing the outside creation with the energy of the Dunamis Demiurgos (the shaping power of God). In A Dalliance with the Damned, Lucifer seizes on the void’s new potential and transforms it into a new, alternate creation, to which all are welcome so long as they abide by a single rule: no worshiping.

The Basanos temporarily usurp control of this creation from Lucifer in The Divine Comedy. With the help of Mazikeen and her kin, Meleos, a cherub named Gaudium, and Elaine, Lucifer is able to defeat the Basanos, but at the cost of Elaine’s life. Before Lucifer has fully recovered from the battle, however, he must travel to Hell to honor an agreement requiring him to confront the angel Samael in a battle to the death. In Inferno, the lords of Hell conspire to assure Lucifer’s loss, but Mazikeen and Christopher Rudd, a damned soul who has inadvertently acquired a position of power in Hell’s court, help Lucifer turn the tables on his enemies.

In Mansions of Silence, the plot switches focus from Lucifer to a crew he has assembled to sail the Naglfar, a ship from Norse mythology, into a delicate region of the afterlife to rescue Elaine’s soul. While the crew struggles to reach Elaine, Lucifer and Michael submerge themselves in an artificial pool containing God’s consciousness, wherein they learn that God has abandoned his throne in Heaven. As a result of God’s abdication, all of his creation is gradually disintegrating. What is more, God’s absence makes heaven a target for power-hungry immortals. When two titans, Garams and Gyges, attempt to assume God’s throne in Exodus, it takes the combined power of Lucifer, Mazikeen, and Michael to stop them. Fearing further attacks, Lucifer exiles all immortals from his own creation. A restored Elaine, now serving as the guardian angel of the alternate creation, ensures they leave peacefully.

In The Wolf Beneath the Tree, Fenris the wolf sets in motion events that will lead to the destruction of God’s throne and thereby bring about Ragnarok, the end of the world. Lucifer, Michael, and Elaine track him to Yggdrasil, the World Tree, but at its base Fenris tricks Lucifer into killing Michael, thus further hastening the end of creation. In an attempt to slow the onset of Ragnarok, Elaine absorbs the Dunamis Demiurgos from a dying Michael. In Crux, she learns how to use it by fashioning a third creation under Lucifer’s guidance. While she learns, a plethora of plots previously left dangling are picked back up and rushed toward a single point: a climactic battle in heaven for the sake of all creation. Morningstar recounts this battle, which ends in a meeting among Yaweh, Elaine, and Lilith, as the two women plead for the fate of creation. Ultimately, Elaine collapses the three different creations into one and assumes the function of God, thus securing the safety of reality.

Evensong reads as an epilogue. Past characters return, past story lines are wrapped up, and new possibilities for the future are envisioned. Elaine relinquishes the last remnants of her human personality, and Lucifer sets forth alone on a journey beyond the limits of creation.

Volumes

•Lucifer: Devil in the Gateway (2001). Collects The Sandman Presents: Lucifer, issues 1-3, and Lucifer, issues 1-4. Sets the stage for the rest of the series. Key concepts, such as the “outside” of creation, and key characters, such as the Basanos and Elaine Belloc, are introduced.

•Lucifer: Children and Monsters (2001). Collects Lucifer, issues 5-13. Through an assortment of stories, introduces a large number of characters whose significance will not be revealed until later in the series. Also introduces, via Elaine’s three competing families, the question of parentage’s effect on free will—a major theme of the series.

•A Dalliance with the Damned (2002). Collects Lucifer, issues 14-20. This volume focuses on the culture of Hell, which, after Lucifer’s abdication, has come to resemble that of an early modern European court.

•Lucifer: The Divine Comedy (2003). Collects Lucifer, issues 21-28. In this volume, the Basanos attempt to supplant Lucifer as ruler of his creation.

•Lucifer: Inferno (2004). Collects Lucifer, issues 29-35. Features Lucifer’s battle against Samael in Hell. This volume also marks the beginning of the incorporation of Norse mythology into the plot.

•Lucifer: Mansions of Silence (2004). Collects Lucifer, issues 36-41. In this volume, a group of characters introduced individually in previous volumes set off together into the afterlife in an attempt to rescue Elaine.

•Lucifer: Exodus (2005). Collects Lucifer, issues 42-44 and 46-49. This volume tells of the Titans’ attack on Heaven. A series of stand-alone stories also detail the departure of the last few immortals from Lucifer’s creation.

•Lucifer: The Wolf Beneath the Tree (2005). Collects Lucifer, issues 45 and 50-54. Introduces Fenris and Lilith, the primary antagonists for the rest of the series.

•Lucifer: Crux (2006). Collects Lucifer, issues 55-61. In this volume, Lilith assembles an army to march on Heaven, while Jill Presto gives birth to the child of the Basanos.

•Lucifer: Morningstar (2006). Collects Lucifer, issues 62-69. The climax of the series: Lucifer and his supporters battle against Lilith and Fenris for the safety of creation.

•Lucifer: Evensong (2007). Collects Lucifer: Nirvana, a brief story set earlier in the series’ continuity, and Lucifer, issues 70-75. This volume functions as an extended goodbye to the series and its characters.

Characters

•Lucifer, the protagonist, is the first fallen angel and former ruler of Hell. He is tall and slender with pointy ears, orange hair, a Roman nose, and eyebrows always arched disdainfully. A sharp dresser, he possesses a cool demeanor—indifferent bordering on cruel—and a knack for manipulating others. Like the Miltonic Satan on which he is based, he is driven by the desire to realize the independent power of free will. Unlike others opposed to the rule of Yaweh, however, he seeks not an end to God’s creation but passage beyond it. He is thus paradoxically positioned as both creation’s greatest opponent and its ultimate savior.

•Elaine Belloc, a British schoolgirl, is the daughter of Michael and thus the heir to the Dunamis Demiurgos, or shaping power of God. Originally introduced as a supporting character, as the series progresses she becomes the driving force of the plot, often receiving more panel space than Lucifer himself. Her appearance varies throughout the series, but she appears most often as a young woman with short brown hair and angelic wings. Unlike the many other deities in the series, her decisions are driven by kindness and emotional sympathy.

•The Basanos, one of the primary antagonists, are a pack of sentient tarot cards crafted by the angel Meleos. Early in the series they break free from their maker’s control and begin a series of machinations designed to free themselves from the limitations of God’s creation. Destroyed by Lucifer in The Divine Comedy, their power and personality survive in the form of two unborn, immortal children carried by the human cabaret performer Jill Presto.

•Fenris, a major antagonist, is the wolf of Norse legend, fated to usher in Ragnarok, the end of creation. Appearing either as a bestial humanoid covered in tattoos or as a wolf, he is a sly and merciless opponent, driven by little more than the sheer desire for destruction.

•Lilith, the predecessor of Eve, is the first female woman and first mother in the history of God’s creation. Mother to Mazikeen, she possesses a regal bearing and is, like her daughter, beautiful, with long, dark hair. Once the lover of demons and angels, she used her children to help Heaven’s angels build their Silver City; upon its completion, they cast her out as profane. Many centuries later, obsessed with revenge, she conspires to destroy the Silver City and, with Fenris, bring about the end of God’s creation.

•Mazikeen is Lucifer’s lover and most loyal ally. A daughter of Lilith and ruler of the Lilim (until Lilith reclaims the position in Crux), she is a keen military strategist and almost unstoppable warrior. Formerly bearing a horrible disfigurement on the left side of her face, which she hid with half a white mask, she is transformed into a beautiful brunette by Jill Presto in Children and Monsters. Despite her bewitching beauty, she possesses a fierce temperament and displays a lack of sympathy for all but Lucifer. She supports him without question, even when he is cold to her; indeed, his ability to survive the numerous attempts on his life often depends on her working tirelessly behind the scenes on his behalf.

•Yaweh, a.k.a. God, is the God of the Old Testament. Though capable of taking any form, he appears primarily as a somewhat portly, older British gentleman, attired in a suit and bowler, with an umbrella in hand. The father of Lucifer (and, in a more abstract fashion, all of creation), he subtly engineers most of the events that take place throughout the series.

Artistic Style

Like many series published under DC’s Vertigo imprint, Lucifer was designed and marketed as writer-driven. Numerous artists contributed to the series over time, but only the writer, Carey, stayed with the project from beginning to end. In keeping with Vertigo’s mission to foreground the writer, the various artistic styles in the series tend to be understated, realist with a slight cartoonish element, and primarily illustrative (rather than narrative) in function. Like other Vertigo series, speech bubbles are prevalent, splash pages are rare (occurring, on average, less than once per issue), and panels are standard rectangles. Occasionally, stories are done in washes and watercolors, but the vast majority of the series is done in pencils and ink, with standard comic book coloring (though on the muted side) added subsequently.

Beginning with issue 5, artists Peter Gross and Ryan Kelly joined Carey as a standard part of the creative team. Though they did not contribute to every subsequent issue, their input helped further standardize the style of the series. Under their hand, panels are kept spare, major emphasis going to characters and character-driven action rather than backgrounds and scenery. Though panels did not normally overlap, Gross sometimes treats the entire page as a single panel, on which normal-size panels could be placed, thus eliminating the traditional white space between panels. This helps establish a visual hierarchy on the page, whereby one panel could receive greater visual weight than others. On pages where such a technique was not used, the white space between panels is colored so as to reflect the atmosphere of the setting.

Also of note is the lettering, originally designed by Todd Klein for The Sandman Presents: Lucifer (for which he won an Eisner Award in 2000), but adopted by all subsequent letterers for Lucifer. Different deities often speak in a different font. Lucifer, for example, speaks in a stylized, gothic font, Remiel in traditional cursive, and Briadach in runic. The associated speech bubbles are often stylized as well. Briadach’s speech bubbles, for example, have shaky lines and angular edges.

Themes

Like The Sandman, the series from which Lucifer spun off, Lucifer draws its characters and general stories from the world’s collective mythology. Major sources include the Old Testament, the Jewish Apocrypha, John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667, revised 1674), the Norse Edda, Native American myths, and Eastern folklore. Whereas The Sandman employed these myths to explore the poetry of human life, in the process humanizing traditional representations of the divine, Lucifer follows the opposite course: Mythic deities are rendered larger than life, while the human beings caught in their paths are deprived of agency and made to suffer. This reflects a darker vision of reality, in which both deities and humans, both subject to an inflexible causality crafted by God, play out roles they had no hand in choosing. The events of the series thus progress as a perfectly engineered machine, one event leading inexorably to the next, while the actions of the characters, always forced into reactive modes, inadvertently drive the machine’s gears.

The major theme of this brutal world is the problem of free will. Does it exist at all or is it merely an illusion? Like Milton’s Satan, Lucifer stands for free will. His every action is calculated toward realizing its possibility. However, from the series’ opening story, in which Lucifer does service for God in exchange for a letter of passage granting him exit from God’s creation, God’s calculations seem already to have included and accounted for Lucifer’s own. Indeed, as the series progresses, and Lucifer is gradually transformed from principal actor to reactor—even being forced to battle for the preservation of God’s creation—it becomes increasingly unclear whether Lucifer’s own disobedience might not also have been a predetermined part of God’s intricate system.

A related theme hinges on the issue of engenderment or creation. More specifically: Is the identity of the created thing merely a function of the creator’s own identity? Lucifer and Michael, the first sons of God, wrestle with this question throughout the series, but it confronts other characters as well, most often through the issues of pregnancy and parentage. Indeed, much of the series’ conflict is driven by the attempts of characters to produce offspring, abort offspring, or assert their authority upon their offspring. In general, the series asserts the existence of an inescapable (and often destructive) bond between parent and child that cannot be duplicated by nonblood relations. The two-issue story “Stitch-Glass Slide” (occurring in Exodus), however, puts forth the possibility of an alternative model of parentage, built upon adoption and the willing sacrifice of parental desire.

Lucifer addresses these themes by alternating back and forth between large cosmic stories involving mythical characters and deities and smaller, personal stories about individuals attempting to live everyday lives. There are thus two concurrent levels of plot: the cosmic, or macro, and the human, or micro. Thus, another major theme of Lucifer is the relation between these two orders, the macro and micro—which of the two offers the proper vantage point for the creation and/or perception of meaning? Though Lucifer never fully answers this question and in fact reverts almost entirely to the micro order in the series’ final volume, the series is often mercilessly cruel to its human characters, who are frequently made to suffer merely for coming into contact with the larger forces that drive the world. The single-issue story “The Thunder Sermon” (collected in A Dalliance with the Damned) is emblematic in this regard, describing the cold fate of two humans who unwittingly find themselves inside Lucifer’s Los Angeles home.

Impact

In the mid-1990’s, DC published a number of new, adult-themed fantasy series under its Vertigo imprint in an effort to capitalize on the popularity of Gaiman’s The Sandman. Lucifer was the most successful of these series in terms of both sales and industry prestige (it is also one of the few to have been fully collected in graphic novel form). Indeed, Lucifer demonstrated that the myth-driven style of storytelling introduced by Gaiman could be taken up and modified by other writers to produce popular series and characters. However, though Lucifer proved the viability of that particular storytelling mode, the series also marked the end of DC’s commitment to it. By the time Lucifer ended, popular taste had shifted away from myth and fantasy comics and toward crime, science fiction, and politically nuanced adventure comics.

Lucifer is also noteworthy for introducing Carey to the comic book industry. His success with Lucifer quickly earned him stints on a variety of series, including Hellblazer, Wetworks, and X-Men. Because he is from Great Britain, he is often classified as part of the “British Invasion” that included Warren Ellis, Grant Morrison, and Garth Ennis (as well as a reemergent Alan Moore). Though Carey’s work for Lucifer is contemporaneous with these artists’ most famous works, his writing style is more traditional, less subversive, and less edgy.

Lucifer remains a cult favorite, but it is gradually receding from popular awareness because of the little effort DC has made in marketing the series since its ending. Whereas other Vertigo books have been rereleased in special deluxe or collector’s editions or made the subject of in-house retrospectives, Lucifer has become a comparatively stale intellectual property.

Further Reading

Delano, Jamie, et al. Hellblazer (1988- ).

Gaiman, Neil, et al. The Books of Magic (1990-1991).

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. The Sandman (1989-1996).

Bibliography

Bender, Hy. The Sandman Companion. New York: DC Comics, 1999.

Carey, Mike. “The Devil’s Business.” In Lucifer: Evensong. New York: DC Comics, 2007.

Ellison, Harlan. Introduction to The Sandman: Season of Mists. New York: DC Comics, 1992.

Gaiman, Neil. Foreword to Lucifer: Devil in the Gateway. New York: DC Comics, 2001.

King, Charles W. “What If It’s Just Good Business? Hell, Business Models, and the Dilution of Justice in Mike Carey’s Lucifer.” In Hell and Its Afterlife: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives, edited by Isabel Moreira and Margaret Toscano. London: Ashgate, 2010.

Newsing, John. “British Comics and the ‘Boom.’” Science Fiction Studies 31 (2004): 174-175.