Lucifer, Vol. 1-11 (Mike Carey)

A spin-off series of Neil Gaiman's landmark Sandman books, Lucifer begins as an episodic, day-in-the-life-of-the-lightbringer tale, quickly evolving into a labyrinthine, often nonplussing, epic which spawns dozens of characters in a myriad of locales, factual and mythological.

Unlike Gaiman, Carey's imagination for unique voices is slim, so the characters will blend and blur if you're not paying attention. But like Gaiman, Carey has a flair for pacing, staggering plot arches, and interweaving mythos and drama. The question will be, how much of that staggering and interweaving can you handle. Take a step back after closing the last page and you'll notice that the 2000+-page story wasn't a complex one in terms of actual events. But in the middle of the fray it feels like too much has happened to hold it all together.

The story picks up where Sandman left off, but after an indeterminable length of time. In Sandman, Vol. 4: Season of Mists, Lucifer Morningstar finally grew too contemptuous of his position as God's shadow and abdicated. After locking up hell and kicking out its last few hangers-on, the devil opened a jazz club called Lux where he seems to be its only patron along with his non-hetero-life-mate, the split-faced, marble-mouthed daughter of Lillith, Mazikeen.

It looks like Old Scratch is going to hunker down to an eternity of near solitude in his creator's universe, learning the piano, and drinking from fluted glasses. But when Carey picks up the pen, it's home-is-where-your-rump-rests for Lucifer as he gets caught up in countless intrigues and conflicts and wars all centering around ownership of existence. And, yeah, some other existences get created, and yeah the furtherance of life as everything knows it gets put on the brink more than a few times, but hey, isn't that supposed to be the fun?

The trouble for me starts with the fact that while Gaiman's Endless are silently, supremely confident about their superior roles in the universe, and think nothing of how every culture's individual mythos can somehow coexist without canceling each other out (which always made me suspect that the cultures were less fact, and more collective imagination manifest), Carey's essentially Judeo-Christian reality takes its rules so seriously that you begin to wonder why it concerns itself with the rules of other mythos/cultures, since the buck appears to stop with the capital G God. So references and occurrences that take place within the realm of these other cultures take on a kind of lip service quality, robbing them of any real dramatic worth. That said, what Carey manages to communicate using the Judeo-Christian symbols is astounding.

Where Carey's writing and plotting fail, the art succeeds, since, like Sandman, this project attracted a big crowd of big talent. Everyone from Peter Gross to P. Craig Russell to Ted Naifeh was brought in to draw an issue or three and the result is a visual smorgasbord that moves things along when Carey gets bogged down in philosophical meandering.

The greatest triumph of the series is Carey creating an entirely plausible and engaging yarn about what could happen in the modern universe if God and the devil were really beings that had to live with one another, and deal with old grudges.

Phoenix, Vol. 1 - 13 (Osamu Tezuka)

Unarguably the single greatest achievement in the career of the most influential mangaka (Manga cartoonist) in Japan's history, Phoenix rockets back and forth across the temporal plane from volume to volume, telling tales of future and past, that each get a little closer to the present as the volumes tick by. After only the first few volumes the greater design comes into focus: Tezuka is telling the history of the universe.

And what retelling of the history of time would be complete without a lot of rumination on the nature of time and man's mortal role in the universe (unless you're Larry Gonick)? While the phoenix (Hi no tori, in Japanese, meaning 'firebird') owns the name of the series, he/she/it and its many manifestations is mearly a backdrop, or a point of obsession for the real characters, stepping in only as a greek chorus to manipulate the characters, or a god descending from the ink, and Tezuka does not exhaust any one way of revising the reader's concept of what the phoenix is. In one volume the phoenix becomes puppeteer to a scientist who will be allowed to witness the universe as himself a god, in one volume the phoenix will remain an elusive shadow to an artist who seeks to represent the firebird's glory in a painting or else lose his life to a sinister, commissioning lord, and in another volume a red herring of a bird is captured and warred over by rivaling Japanese lords, as they vie for the phoenix's blood and eternal life.

My personal favourite story, Strange Beings (half of Vol. 9), does the old 'time flows backwards' trick to tell the story of life and the universe as a never-ending backwards loop, involving the life of a girl (raised as a boy by a murderous tyrant) who unintentionally becomes the universe's private, eternal mother Theresa.

The cultural effects of the Phoenix saga may have been even more far-reaching had Tezuka not perished before penning its conclusion, presumably set in the modern day. But maybe that's for his readers to accomplish.

This is a sculpture of the famous firebird, which sits just outside the Osamu Tezuka museum in Takarazuka, Japan (20km northwest from Osaka).

Y: The Last Man (Brian K. Vaughan)

A series so good that on the front of every volume is a different exclamatory quotation from a different, highly-regarded member of the upper echelons in the literary community. Stephen King calls it the greatest GN series he’s ever read. Which is both a huge smack down to the rest of the community, and utterly true.

You can think of it as my number one, desert island, eyes are about to be gouged out forever pick. So let's get it out of the way first.

Y is a Shakespearean in magnitude (and, often, in reference) recount of the last man on earth, Yorick, and his journey across the globe in a world of suicidal, tortured, drug-addled, samurai-sword-wielding, hormone-befuddled, grief-stricken ladies, all of whom are trying to move on in their futureless society, unknowing that the key to human survival is being carted around in secret by a group of American interests, all bent on keeping megalomaniac Amazons, and logical militaries, and ruthless ninjas, and, yes, even pirates, from severing that chance at survival for good.

Brian K. Vaughan has penned two other series (Ex Machina and Runaways) as well as some one-offs (Pride of Baghdad), each with a similar tone and artistic execution, but only in Y is his vision so thoroughly exacted, rich with timeless social commentary. Who else in the biz knows how to pack in pop culture references to make even the most outcast social misfit feel like an insider?

Art by Pia Guerra and Jose Marzan Jr. is at worst very competent, and at best stop-you-in-your-tracks arresting. At least once per volume (if not per issue) does the scene arrive where you remember everything that makes comics great in a single page-filling panel.

In expectation for the upcoming film version, Vertigo is releasing the series in five collectible editions, the first of which is already available through Chapters and your local, and much more deserving, comic boutique.

For more info: http://www.bkv.tv/