Why Vertigo’s Lucifer Morningstar Matters: Part 1 of 4

The Devil shuts down Hell and opens up a piano bar in Los Angeles. It sounds like an absurd premise, but Lucifer Morningstar—the titular anti-hero of Lucifer (1999 – 2006), the mature fantasy series of DC Comics’ Vertigo imprint—is the true heir of the Miltonic-Romantic Satan. Sympathetic Satans may have appeared in George Bernard Shaw’s Man and Superman (1903), Mark Twain’s Letters from the Earth (1909), and Anatole France’s The Revolt of the Angels (1914), but these Devils simply do not possess the titanic grander of the Satan out of Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667) or the Lucifer out of Lord Byron’s Cain: A Mystery (1821). Mike Carey’s 75-issue Lucifer, on the other hand, takes the fallen angel as its star, and Lucifer has not been portrayed in such a Romantic light since the days of Romantic Satanism.

Lucifer is a spinoff series from Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman (1989 – 1996), which depicts in its “Season of Mists” storyline what we might call Lucifer’s second rebellion. It occurs to Lucifer, after ten billion years of reigning in Hell, that he is no freer than when he was in Heaven—that he has merely allowed God to recast him in the cosmic scheme. “ ‘Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heaven,’ ” muses Gaiman’s Lucifer. “We didn’t say it. Milton said it. And he was blind.”1 This disillusioned Devil determines to quit, closing down Hell, having his wings hacked from his back, and retiring to L.A., where he becomes the proprietor of the élite piano bar, Lux. (The name Lucifer, Latin for “Light-Bearer,” is comprised of the words lux and ferre.)

Lucifer Morningstar by Peter Gross
Lucifer Morningstar  ©Peter Gross

Carey’s Lucifer bestows upon its title character an outer beauty reminiscent of Romanticism’s visual renditions of Milton’s Satan, following the lead of Gaiman’s Sandman (which took David Bowie as its model for the fallen angel). Lucifer’s initial image is something of a pop cultural Satanic stereotype of the debonair gentleman Devil—tuxedo, cummerbund, bowtie and all—but he later adopts more dandified attire, replete with coattails and cravat. Clothing aside, Lucifer is clearly more angelic than demonic; the rest of Hell’s denizens are bestial or insectile in appearance, but not Lucifer, the blonde-haired, golden-eyed, smooth-faced, handsome Devil. The fallen angel becomes more angelic still: early in the series, Lucifer journeys to reclaim his severed wings, which, in their separation from his body, have self-healed, the bat-wings of Hell’s angel transforming back to their former, feathery state.2 Commenting on the “long metamorphosis in the eighteenth century” of Milton’s Satan, when he was declared an exemplar of the sublime, Peter L. Thorslev, Jr. observes that “when he re-emerged in the romantic mind, he was no longer the (larval) serpent of the later books of Paradise Lost [IX.157–91, 412 ff.; X.504–77], but had reassumed his archangelic wings…”3 It is a beautiful metaphor, and I find it rather fitting that this is quite literally the case in Carey’s Lucifer, wherein the Miltonic-Romantic Satan has re-emerged in our own time.

Lucifer’s internal motives are just as alluring as his external beauty. In a flashback to his time in Heaven—here “the Silver City”—Carey’s prelapsarian Lucifer observes, “We’re fighting for freedom…Freedom to define ourselves. Freedom from the tyranny of predestination.”4 Lucifer’s rebellion is not a lapse but a liberation; the rebel angel finds himself not “a planet that’s left its orbit” but “a star,” the Morningstar vaunting, “I’ll borrow light from no one.”5 His heavenly uprising is of course doomed to defeat, and Lucifer is relocated to Hell, where he rules as absolute Lord, but the Lord of Hell ultimately realizes that true freedom eluded him in both his War in Heaven and reign in Hell, as “all his power brought him not one step closer to his true goal. That is why he left, of course.…Because he knew that he was not free, and it hurt his dignity to dance on the end of a leash.”6 It is during his time on Earth that Lucifer is presented with the opportunity to attain what he had always desired and pursued at all costs: freedom from God’s will.

In the opening story of Lucifer, the grisly angel Amenadiel—who harbors a deep-seated hatred for the Morningstar that eventually costs him his life—reports to Lucifer that if he chooses to carry out a divine errand in the service of Heaven, God will grant His wayward angelic son a letter of passage into the void outside of Creation.7 “Freedom is his obsession,”8 and so Lucifer accepts, using the liberating letter of passage he attains to become the creator of his own cosmos, which exists independently of Yahweh’s Creation. There, we see Lucifer at his most joyous, celebrating his victory as “The culmination of all my efforts. The end of predestination. The end of tyranny. I have escaped from Providence…I’ve gone into the god business.”9

Although in Lucifer the Devil becomes a god, he never quite obtains the boundless freedom he so desires, the series largely revolving around Lucifer’s unending struggle to become genuinely free. In writing a liberty-loving Lucifer whose grand ambition of self-authorship is incessantly frustrated, Carey inevitably found the fallen angel to be “a tragic figure,” as he explained in a 2002 interview with Comic Book Resources, and paradoxically Lucifer’s cosmic tragedy struck Carey as a very human dilemma that we can all relate to:

What he wants is freedom, and he can never have it – not in the absolute sense that he wants it. There’s a divine plan of which he’s a part, and he can’t get off that particular hook no matter what he does.…Lucifer knows that he’s a creation of someone else, a contingent being, and he wants to escape from that position – to slip out of the chains of God’s foreknowledge and God’s plan. For us the chains are different: we’re set on certain courses by our genes and by our upbringing. We all reach a point where we want to be our own authors, and we can’t, any more than Lucifer can. I don’t know whether that’s a tragedy or a farce, but it’s a fundamental part of being a human being. Lucifer isn’t a human being, of course, but in this he’s Everyman.

Lucifer’s existential crisis of free will was present in him since the beginning. In a flashback to the earliest chronological moment of Creation, Yahweh issues instructions to Michael, Lucifer (or Samael, Lucifer’s original angelic name in this version), and Gabriel, who are to assist in the cosmic construction project. Lucifer is “made of will,” and Yahweh created him as incarnate willpower to play an integral part in the Creation: “Lucifer’s will shaped [matter] into suns.”10 When given the command to fulfill his function, however, Lucifer cannot help but question his Father: “Why?.…What right have you to assign? To determine our actions?”11 Not long after, this living tool of God, disgusted by the idea of lacking self-determination and existing only to satisfy the will of another, instead wills himself against his Creator, transforming himself into “self-will personified,” as William Hazlitt summarized Milton’s Satan.12 Thereafter, Lucifer is in his unending struggle for individual sovereignty “as constant in his course as the star that shares his name.”13

Speaking of his name, while Yahweh’s angels on occasion refer to Lucifer as “the Adversary,” the Hebrew name Satan is never invoked in the entire series. Carey’s Devil is always Lucifer—“the Lightbringer, the Shepherd of Suns”14—and the effect of the preference for Lucifer over Satan is rather reminiscent of Lord Byron’s in Cain, the literary apex of Romantic Satanism. While restoring the name/title Lucifer to the fallen angel, Byron infused Lucifer’s native name with new irreverent meaning, for the Byronic Morningstar bears infernal light—the Promethean enlightenment of a self-assertively godless existence. Carey’s Lucifer lives up to this Byronic precedent. In addition to enhancing his élite elegance and aristocratic arrogance, the princely name Lucifer emphasizes the rebel angel’s light-bearing nature. This lordly Lucifer is a beacon of untrammeled individualism, and like the Romantics, Carey explores the deep ambivalence of the pursuit of absolute freedom. Like the Miltonic-Romantic Satan, however, Carey’s Lucifer unavoidably awes readers with the sublime incandescence of his uncompromising independence.

 

Notes


1. Neil Gaiman, The Sandman: Season of Mists (New York: DC Comics, 2010), “Episode 1.”
2. See Mike Carey, Lucifer: Children and Monsters (New York: DC Comics, 2001), pp. 79–80.
3. Peter L. Thorslev, Jr., “The Romantic Mind Is Its Own Place,” Comparative Literature, Vol. 15, No. 3 (Summer, 1963), pp. 251–52.
4. Mike Carey, Lucifer: Devil in the Gateway (New York: DC Comics, 2001), p. 94.
5. Mike Carey, Lucifer: The Wolf Beneath the Tree (New York: DC Comics, 2005), p. 43.
6. Mike Carey, Lucifer: The Divine Comedy (New York: DC Comics, 2003), p. 6.
7. Carey, Lucifer: Devil in the Gateway, pp. 13–14.
8. Ibid., p. 73.
9. Carey, Lucifer: Children and Monsters, p. 200.
10. Carey, Lucifer: The Divine Comedy, pp. 107, 119. In Lord Byron’s Cain, Lucifer similarly claims to have “aided in [the Maker’s] work…” (I.i.531).
11. Mike Carey, Lucifer: Evensong (New York: DC Comics, 2007) p. 131.
12. William Hazlitt, Lectures on the English Poets (1818), “Lecture III: On Shakespeare and Milton,” in The Romantics on Milton: Formal Essays and Critical Asides, ed. Joseph Anthony Wittreich, Jr. (Cleveland: The Press of Case Western Reserve University, 1970), p. 384.
13. Mike Carey, Lucifer: A Dalliance with the Damned (New York: DC Comics, 2002), p. 70.
14. Carey, Lucifer: Devil in the Gateway, p. 65.