Lucifer: Vol 11: Evensong (2007)

Author: Mike Carey | Illustrators: Peter Gross / Ryan Kelly / Dean Ormston / John J. Muth / Zander Cannon / Aaron Alexovich | Page Count: 216

“If mercy’s your aim, be relentless in your mercy.  Be absolute. 

Be yourself, until you bleed.”

The final volume.  It’s time for Lucifer to put his affairs in order before taking what he feels is the best course of action.  Carey wraps up the series with some single issue stories that pick up the pieces and suggest potential futures of many of the main characters and a few of the more memorable secondary ones.

The women of the series made the toughest choices and underwent the greatest change.  Their growth is explored beautifully.  In a perfect world that story would never end.  It’s a bitter-sweet experience; particularly for my favourite character.
It surprised me to find that I will miss the Lucifer cast just as much (and in some cases even more) than I miss the Sandman cast.

More than any other volume, Evensong feels like it’s firmly in the Sandman universe.  The structure of certain events and the interactions of the players are on a par with it.  Carey states in his afterword that Lucifer was never his character, he was just lucky enough to be able to journey with him, to guide him through adventures and growth.  While that is certainly true, in my mind Lucifer was an underdeveloped catalyst until Carey wrote him firmly into Sandman lore.  He deserves credit for taking a piece of clay and crafting an exquisite piece of art.

The book collects together Lucifer issues 70 - 75, and Lucifer: Nirvana one-shot.

5 farewell gifts out of 5

Lucifer: Vol 10: Morningstar (2006)

Author: Mike Carey | Illustrators: Peter Gross / Ryan Kelly / Colleen Doran / Michael Kaluta | Page Count: 192

“Fight.  Win, or be defeated.  Die.  Make your own arrangements.

I'm not your keeper.”

Book 10 of 11 in the Lucifer series.  After a deeply emotional opening, picking up a thread that you may have thought done and dusted from one of the earlier books, the apocalyptic conclusion to the shit-storm that has built around the Lightbringer for the past few books gets quickly underway.  What follows is conflict on a grand scale.  It’s chaos unleashed in a place unprepared for it.  Again.

While some fight for victory, some for honour, and some for the joy of fighting, Lucifer knows that to craft the New he must first destroy the Old, and not just in the physical sense.  The victor may win the battle but it’s not just Above and Below any longer; the whole of Creation itself is at stake.  So what if the collateral damage is a few billion souls?  His rules are the only rules that matter.

It could’ve turned into preachy theologizing but Carey avoids that, cleverly balancing the personal with the practical, the individual aspect with the mob mentality.  It makes sense that it ends this way.  Lucifer was never God’s opposite; he was the thing that God could never be, grounded as he was by his own stagnant rules.  Lucifer fights against predestination.  He fights for freedom; not the human militant concept of freedom, but the freedom of the individual will.

This penultimate volume is the focal end of the series.  Vol 11 is the coda.  That gives Carey the opportunity to concentrate on the story at hand and leave the loose end gathering for another time.

The book collects together Lucifer issues 62 – 69.

4½ family feuds out of 5

2010: Odyssey Two (1982)

Author: Arthur C. Clarke | Page Count: 297

"Moods and emotions were leaking into his own consciousness, though he could not identify any specific concepts or ideas. It was as if he were listening, outside a closed door, to a debate in progress, and in a language he could not understand."

2010: Odyssey Two is a direct sequel to 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) but it's not that simple. Stanley Kubrick's filmed version of 2001 had some minor but significant differences from the novel. The second book mostly follows on from the film, not the novel, so we're returning to Jupiter and Io, not to Saturn and Iapetus. If you bypass the film and come direct from the first book, then you'll be confused and perhaps angry at the discrepancies and apparent lack of continuity.

Dr. Heywood Floyd, a scientist mentioned previously in 2001, is determined to understand the fate of the Spaceship Discovery and its crew, so a second mission is launched in order to intercept the Discovery, which has remained dead in Jupiter's orbit for the past nine years. Along for the ride is Dr. Chandra, the creator of the H.A.L 9000 computer. In Kubrick's film he was called Mr. Langley.

Clarke isn't very good at characterisation this timne. When he breaks from hard sci-fi in an attempt to offer some insight into the crew it feels forced, and there's a lot more crew aboard this time. They offer ample opportunity for tension and drama but he never fully avails of it. Most of the time he uses an expositive cold narrative in place of proper dialogue that keeps the characters two dimensional. Some of the lesser characters have no function other than to fill a necessary scientific role so that Clarke can extrapolate about scientific principles that may or may not be wholly relevant to the plot. In retrospect, the absence of dialogue is what helped make the first half of the 2001 novel so successful.

While critical of his ability to develop characters, I can't fault his passion for detailing new worlds and forms of life. His brain seemed more attuned to receiving creative input from a scientific perspective than from a dramatic one. If you accept that and embrace the science-head aspect of it, at the expense of a satisfactory human element, you can get sucked into Clarke's vision more easily.

Personally, I didn't want to know what became of Dave, I liked the uncertainty, but I was eager for more of H.A.L.

3 problematic epilogues out of 5

Lucifer: Vol 9: Crux (2006)

Author: Mike Carey | Illustrators: Peter Gross / Ryan Kelly / Marc Hempel / Ronald Wimberly | Page Count: 168

“I walked on into chaos, and the earth beat like a heart beneath my feet.”

Book 9 of 11 in the Lucifer series.  The dictionary defines a CRUX as “…a vital or decisive stage, point, etc. / a baffling problem or difficulty.”  The book embodies both of those things.

The first story kicks off with the politics of Hell once again in disarray.  The current Duke of Gly plays a pivotal role in what direction it’ll take.  I didn't think Marc Hempel’s art on this piece a good match for Mike Carey’s words.  His cartoon styling lessens the severity of the situation.  I liked his version of Gaudium but I’d like Gaudium even if he was drawn by a 5 year old in a blindfold.

After that single issue the regular team of Gross and Kelly take over for the titular tale.  Carey’s ability to drop little things into the plot, things that through causality will escalate into giant things if left unchecked, makes this volume more than exciting.  While it’s true that characters should be left to grow at their own pace, sometimes they need a little push.

A short interlude follows, full of contrasts and hard choices for a series regular.  It runs concurrent with the Crux storyline.  Guest artist Ronald Wimberly takes pen duties.  His style is perfect for depicting what unfolds.  I loved every purposeful line of it.  From that point on, Crux kicks ass all the way to the very end.  Lucifer is back to being essential reading again.

The book collects together Lucifer issues 55 – 61.

4½ happenings in Vegas out of 5

Lucifer: Vol 8: The Wolf Beneath the Tree (2005)

Author: Mike Carey | Illustrators: Peter Gross / Ryan Kelly / P. Craig Russell / Ted Naifeh | Page Count: 160

“To read aloud from the book makes the book an element in the story it tells.”

Book 8 of 11 in the Lucifer series. This one opens with the 50th issue, pencilled by P. Craig Russell. He did The Sandman 50th issue so it makes sense he’d also do this one. Russell’s art is of his usual high standard, full of open splendour or intimate moments when needed. It’s titled Lilith. If you've been following the series from the beginning you’ll be able to guess how that ties in with events thus far, and what it means for one or more of the supporting characters. What you may not know is how large a part it played in other events. It’s an eye-opener.

A gathering puts the Lightbringer face to face with the embodiment of the thing he despises the most; if you've been paying attention to what you've been reading up to now you’ll notice it’s the thing that he’s spent the previous seven books trying to escape. Carey lets the character’s arrogance come to the fore as a defence mechanism. Strength gained from vulnerability is a theme we've seen before but is handled differently this time. I enjoyed that part.

The consequence of Lucifer's actions has caused all sorts of vile things to surface from their lairs. Similarly, Fenris, the Asgardian wolf of Norse mythology, feels the time is right for him to bring on Ragnarok, as was foretold. If that happens it could put a giant Yggdrasil sized splinter in Lucifer’s plans.

Make sure you have book 9 because there is another cliff-hanger ending.

The book collects together Lucifer issues 45, and 50 – 54.

3 guests at the table out of 5

The Boozy Bard: Shakespeare on Drinking (2006)

Author: William Shakespeare | Page Count: 208

"I am weary; yea, my memory is tired.

Have we no wine here?"

Coriolanus.  Act I. Scene 9.

Boozy Bard is one of those books that leave you in no doubt as to the content, as the title tells you all you need to know. It's Shakespeare on drinking. Someone, the editor(s) name is mysteriously absent, has collected together all the instances that the bard had his characters tanked or used alcohol as a metaphor for something else. It's no surprise that Falstaff features more than once.

There's no good reason for it to exist as a physical book. A webpage could offer the same content and be equally as irreverent. Save yourself money by going to the library, borrow The Norton Shakespeare and then hit the bar to toast his good name until you see the underside of the table. Job done.

Naught but a waste of paper and ink out of 5

Lucifer: Vol 7: Exodus (2005)

Author: Mike Carey | Illustrators: Peter Gross / Ryan Kelly | Page Count: 168

“I served our Father faithfully,

and my reward was to be chastised for not being you.”

Book 7 of 11 in the Lucifer series.  The Morningstar is forced to take preventative measures to ensure the safety of his property.  After the effort expelled to create and then to keep it, to leave it open to God’s whim now would be folly.  This forces him into a position with the Heavenly Host that’d he’d rather avoid but sometimes circumstance forces even the hand of the angels.

Elsewhere, the secondary characters are given more to do, in a more thought-out and interesting storyline than last time.  And while this leaves Lucifer absent a lot of the time it really didn't matter because the parallel storylines kept my attention diverted.

There's a lot of humour in Exodus.  It was unexpected but not unwelcome after the drawn-out nature of the previous book.  The fugly little fallen Cherub Gaudium gets a chance to shine.  He and his sister could sustain an off-shoot of their own, about the domestic problems of two incompetent siblings.  I’d buy it.

There's a beautifully penned dark fairytale about a troubled boy and an eager, pensive demon.  It works both in the context of the Lucifer universe and would work equally well if it were removed from it.  It reminded me why I fell in love with comics.  Their ability to be both heart-warming visually and filled with deeper metaphor textually is a great strength.

The final few pages are a cliff-hanger that had me grasping for the next volume off the shelf immediately.

The book collects together Lucifer issues 42 - 44, and 46 – 49

4 great needs to blaspheme out of 5