Lucifer #17: Beverly Means Business

The first time I picked up Lucifer #17 was just to take a quick peek. That quick peek when from standing at my kitchen counter to sitting at the table. Somehow I found myself reading the entire issue on my living room couch. What hooked me in were the opening pages. We left off in Lucifer #16 with Achilles beating Lucifer to the Hunted God. The Hunted God ended up being Beverly Walsh, the most innocent looking middle aged woman. The first panel shows an antler sprouting from the side of her head. The next is the massive Achilles chasing Beverly down the hallway. He triggers a trap and is immediately shot with arrows in the chest and suspended by a rope around his ankle. It turns out her father constantly had nightmares about monsters coming to get her, so she was prepared despite being surprised. I was 100% on Team Beverly when she picked up Achilles’ sword and asked which heel was his weak one.

The shift between the end of issue #16 and the start of this one was so unexpected yet it was only the start of what is to come. A lot happens in a short amount of time. Odin summons the hunters and provides them horses, but they end up eating them. They are hungry for everything, especially blood. Odin raises the horse skeletons from the dead and prepares the hunters, but they turn on Odin and take the hunt into their own hands. Like with Beverly’s handling of Achilles (which Lucifer is pleasantly surprised by), Odin’s mangling was a surprise. He spent issue #16 being ripped apart and put back together, but this felt so much more brutal. The entire issue has some of the most gorgeous art to date, especially of the hunters searching the different realms for Beverly.

Lucifer, as always, is impossibly cool. He seems especially cool in this issue, whether he is nonchalantly telling Mazikeen that her friend is dead or introducing himself to Beverly. He seems like a man with a plan, especially when he tells Beverly while sitting on a ferry that they cannot use any of his powers to travel because it might alert the hunters. Well, Lucifer loses a little bit of cool when he argues with Beverly about taking her back home. His quick burst of anger caused a wave to reach out like a monstrous claw and pluck the drunk that had been harassing him just moments before and bury him in the cold water. This moment sets the hunters on Lucifer and Beverly’s trail. Lucifer is usually cooler than the other side of a pillow, but it will be a quick hunt if he keeps having outbursts.