Story good, art not my style...may or may not stick with this series. ( )

Volume 4 focuses on Lucifer's second attempt at creation, which seems idyllic, but proves dismayingly toothless in the face of an outside threat. To be honest, I enjoy seeing Lucifer struggling and failing, if for no other reason than knowing that he's just going to try again.

The other great strength of this volume is that it makes plain the consequences of getting caught up in a struggle for which you're not equipped. Elaine and Jill Presto both have no sense of the stakes being played for or just how much they're nothing more than pawns. ( )

Now that Lucifer has his own universe, it turns out that everyone wants a piece of it. Most notably, the Basanos, the living deck of magical cards that created a prophecy for Lucifer briefly in Devil in the Gateway, want to strike out on their own... and they have the power to do it.  The bulk of The Divine Comedy is the knock-em-down, drag-em-out fight between Lucifer and the Basanos.  This is the best conflict in Lucifer so far: not only is there a genuine, warranted sense of peril in the battle, there's also something at stake for Lucifer that's far more interesting than his survival.  The Basanos want to set themselves up as gods in the new universe, and that violates the only commandment that Lucifer has set for his new realm.

Prominently displayed on the back cover of The Divine Comedy is an image of Death, big sister of Dream of the Endless.  I wondered if this was a gimmicky cameo to appeal to Sandman fans.  And when Lucifer is dying, Death turns up to talk to him, and I was kinda thinking yes.  But then... well... gimmick is far from it.  I should have known that when Death turns up, she's for real.  Man, what a killer moment.

Elsewhere, Elaine Belloc is getting up to her usual hijinks, which are enlivened by the introduction of the greatest comedy side character since Merv Pumpkinhead: Gaudium the Fallen Cherub.  Hardly the most imposing of demons, the little guy talks big, but is unable to back it up, and talks tough, but turns out to be pretty nice: "God? Oh shit, yeah. We used to be big, big friends of his. Yeah, really big. This was when the firmament above and the firmament below hadn't been divided yet. In fact, now that I think back, it was me who gave him the idea for that." He's initially Elaine's bodyguard, but he eventually gets his own side story, a quest into the realm of a dangerous god... only neither he nor his sister are really prepared for what they have to do.  Hilarious, even if does spin out of some rather dark events.

There's also a great sidestory about a centaur girl who tries to do the right thing by Lucifer and gets exactly what you'd expect for her troubles.

Lucifer is definitely firing on all cylinders on this point; now I need to find out what happens next.  Like right away.

Lucifer: « Previous in sequence | Next in sequence »

The plot thickens. And while I'm enjoying the plot, Carey's strengths are in the little asides: "The Writing on the Wall" and "Breaking and Entering" are the best stories in this volume.

Having said that, Mike Carey's definitely found his voice in the fourth volume of Lucifer. The characters he has created are beginning to take on a life of their own and become as fleshed out and interesting as the one he has inherited from Sandman. The plot threads are coming together nicely. ( )

I was predisposed to like this from the title alone, since my Dante geekiness is pure and true. I really wasn't disappointed. The breadth and inventiveness and scope of this title just awes me. Reading it evokes the same sensation I get when I'm deep in the Commedia - of glimpsing a huge framework that is partly comprehensible and partly divine and partly ineffable and partly just really bloody confusing. There is the same slow sense of discovery about the whole thing as well, of peeling back layers to see more and more of what is going on. There are some things that Lucifer knows, and some things that he is only finding out for himself, and some things that can only come as revelation to him. In many ways, the progression of this pings many of the same things that hit me when I read about Dante climbing down through the Inferno and up the mount of Purgatory. More than that, there are a number of aspects of this work that chime in so absolutely with a number of the ways I think about religion, and a number of the ways in which it intrigues me/irks me/has made really, really sure that I haven't classed myself as a Catholic in a long, long time. Those are issues that are probably going to find themselves expressed in a long, wanktastic post on Lucifer, theology, and possibly the Comedy itself once of these days. Feel afraid. *g*

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