As has been the case for a while, I blame myself for my disappointment in the Lucifer series. The irony of that statement being, I still consider it completely fantastic. But at the same time, it has become more and more apparent to me that I’d have gotten more out of it from a straight readthrough than the piecemeal affair that has served me so well with most every other series I’m reading, graphic novel or otherwise. So, my disappointment is rooted in the fact that I’m positive I’m missing some subtleties, and noticing callbacks to other subtleties in earlier volumes that I had felt comfortable with then, but now wonder if I was missing things all along or have perhaps forgotten small, important details. (Not unlike Sandman, Lucifer is full of details that are both small and important.)

Be that as it may, the series’ penultimate volume, Morningstar, does about what you’d expect out of a long literary work: it provides the climax. And when your players are the Devil, the archangel Michael, the massed hordes of hell, and let’s not forget God himself, you are looking at the mother of all climaxes. It is fair to say that this book includes literal Armageddon, as the universe winds down and the biggest questions on everyone’s minds (readers and characters alike) are 1) will we all survive this, or it it really over? and 2) what about dear old Lucifer? Will he save us, die in the attempt, ignore us entirely, or snicker up his sleeve as we are burned in the metaphorical flames of the coming apocalypse?

As it has been for a while, the most interesting question to me is how all of these literary takes on the struggle between God and the Devil, fate and free will, order and chaos, they are always based in Judaism without Christianity. I’m not sure exactly what about the revelation interests me, but it is heavily on my mind whenever I’m waist-deep in this kind of story. My current theory, which probably changes once per new such book I read, is that the author fears (rightly or wrongly) that books with Jesus in them wouldn’t sell as well, because while we as a mass of Western Civilization consumers have no problem with Lucifer being ascendant over God at some point in the story[1], there’s something about Jesus that would feel more inviolable than when it is God, non-sensical though that is when the slightest shred of light is played upon it. Like, it’s some kind of collective gut reaction. …or it could just be that Jesus is simply less literary of a figure than the others, who after all have thousands of years more weight and additional stories behind them than he does. I really have no idea. It’s just something I think about, because he’s really the giant elephant conspicuous by his very absence from the room, when a new retelling of this story gets trotted out.

[1] Whether that is a long-term or short-term accomplishment is beside the point.