Lucifer

Inferno

Review by Mr. Gray - 85%

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Our rating: 85%

Overall rating: 85%

Written by:

Mike Carey

Art by:

Published by:

Vertigo

Related series:

Lucifer

Inferno is easily the best Lucifer volume of the whole series. It does everything you could want and more - epic duels fought between combatants on the fields of hell, with the assembled demons as audience, it has shorter stories to add piquancy to the series as a whole, and it also manages to move the giant wheel of the arced story further still.

It's just really good fun. All the way through.

The art is it's usual odd and simple self with moments of craziness that suit the occasion, though the expressions are better than the earlier volumes and this helps to develop the reader's sense of drama and involvement. Where the art, I'm beginning to understand, is subtly wonderful, is making the hellish feel real, normal, but also tactile and almost sympathetic. If the major characters from Hell were consistently portrayed in gruesome detail, we would remain battered by viscera and cease to sympathise or feel involved in the grand scale of the story.

So the combination of Carey's humanistic approach to Lucifer and Hell, following on from Milton and others, and the enjoyable, often brutal, but never disgusting, art, allows us to be pulled along in a manner that suits the comics form admirably.

Our hats are duly doffed.

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