Written by Dan Watters
Illustrated by Max & Sebastian Fiumara
Published by Vertigo/DC Comics
A police detective visits his ailing wife in the hospital and the former ruler of Hell is imprisoned someplace… strange.
That’s the set-up of Vertigo’s new Lucifer series, part of the new “Sandman Universe” line – an interconnected group of books all taking place within the world of Neil Gaiman’s seminal comic book Sandman.
Given the breadth of Vertigo’s output over the years it‘s unfair to say that the imprint has a house style, but Lucifer fits very nicely into the feel Gaiman and his talented collaborators instituted – with Biblical and Shakespeare references sitting alongside horror imagery and character studies.
Everyone involved in the new Lucifer book knows what they’re doing, and while this first issue doesn’t come close to hitting the highs of Gaiman’s work, it’s a promising start.
The first mystery that’s set up is what the new status quo is for the titular character.
Maybe it’s because I’ve been re-watching Patrick McGoohan’s Prisoner recently, but that part of the story had echoes of The Village. Only with characters plucking their own eyes out.
This is Vertigo, after all.
It’s the nature of ongoing serialized comic books that first issues aren’t going to get you much beyond a taste of what’s to come, so it’s not a surprise that this first issue presents more mysteries than it solves. I’m intrigued enough to want to see where this all goes, but readers who want a more complete story would be advised to wait for the eventual trade collection.
