Wednesday is Comic Day!

Actually this is more a brief review of the work as a whole. After 11 volumes (75 issues), Mike Careys Lucifer story comes to an end. It is definitely a work that he, artist Peter Gross, and Vertigo can be proud of. Who would have thought that a comic book where the protagonists are Satan, an orphaned girl, a facially mutilated woman, and a obscene gross demon and the antagonists are archangels, would be so intriguing. Its been fascinating watching Ellaine Belloc change and become God and Lucifer not change at all. As I read this finally volume, part of my mind was thinking about the work as a whole, and whether it is truly one story that could be bound into one book.

There is a singular story that forms the spine of the book, but there are several off-shooting storylines. I wondered if they were distractions. In the closing comments to the book, Mike Carey talks about the life the book took on. He quotes Neil Gaiman as telling him writing a monthly book was very much a learning experience. You couldnt appreciate from the outside, what a complex collage of planning, serendipity and spur-of-the-moment improvisation the whole project becomes. It wasnt so much that Mike Carey decided to write those off-shoot storylines as it was the characters demanded them. While he obviously uses artistic license, I have a lot of admiration for the amount of research Carey must have done to craft this story on a framework of religious myth and dogma. Any man that can make Satan respectable is either very dangerous or a very talented writer. I think the smartest thing that Carey did is to stick with the true definition of the word evil. Evil isn't about sadism or cruelty or madness. Evil is about self service. Peter Gross' art took longer for me to accept. I remember seeing a few of the early issues on the stand. The covers were striking. I picked one up and opened it and saw a crude style of drawing, nothing like the covers. I put it back. I later picked up the first trade and gave it a chance, the art be damned. After a while, though, that art became the characters and place. It was almost as if hell should have been designed by Peter Gross. I recently picked up an original Lucifer page, from E-bay. This final trade includes the story "Lucifer: Nirvana", that was previously published as a prestige format book.