Just Read: Lucifer, Vol. 1: Devil in the Gateway by Mike Carey and various artists

Someone -- and I don't know if it was Mike Carey specifically -- clearly did a lot of study of the early issues of Sandman before launching Lucifer. You've got your aristocratic, distant, magically powerful main character loosely interacting with what could be either a more serious version of the DC Comics cosmology or a cartoony version of Christian cosmology, and making wry, biting comments along the way. You've got horrific side-plots going on among the mere humans who cross the main character's path. And you've got just a bit of philosophy to keep it all going.

I'm afraid Lucifer left me cold: I didn't like or care about the main character, and, what's worse, I didn't actually believe him as the ex-ruler of Hell. He just felt like a slightly more powerful and assholish John Constantine. (And his assistant, the half-face woman, has a really annoying speech pattern that I just gave up on trying to comprehend after a few pages.) I didn't really care, specifically, about the normal people Lucifer dealt with, either, and the other angels had no angelic qualities I could detect.

So, all in all, this was a big blah for me, and I won't be back for the later volumes. (No foul; I can't read everything.) I'd bought this book a few months back because I was looking for something new to read, and this looked likely, but it turned out to be not for me. (I don't think it's bad -- the art is uniformly good, and Carey clearly can write well -- just that it is very much not for me.)