It's a concept that could easily have been either too wacky or too surreal, the notion of a teenaged girl whose own private god is preventing her sex life, but Carey, Liew and Hempel walk that fine line and turn in something odd, charming and laugh-out-loud funny. Carey's story cuts between Frankie's modern day, teenage life where she's frustrated with the constant attention from her god Jeriven and her younger days, when she got a big kick out of using her favor to her advantage. The artwork by Liew and Hempel also switches, between a modern-day style that is very reminiscent of Sam Kieth and a story of her younger days that emulates a comic strip, and veers closer to Hempel's style. Despite these changes in style, though, the various elements of the story come together perfectly to create a solid foundation for the rest of the tale, and I'm looking forward to seeing it unfold.
Carey breaks the book up into small chapters ranging from one to four pages. The result is that the book reads like a lot of little mini-stories, all coming together to make the larger point. The upshot is that you can read a couple of pages and get a pretty good sense of the book, but the more you read, the more the whole thing works. Frankie's somewhat aggressive personality becomes clear not just in the way she pursues her date, but in the way she has no fear of Jeriven and a certain expectation that things will go her way thanks to his intervention. We see her as a young girl and a teenager, and so we see how she formed this personality, and we also see a pretty important event that began the schism that is widening between Frankie and her god.
Despite the somewhat brusque nature of Frankie, she never comes across as self-centered or arrogant. Her enjoyment of Jeriven's powers in her youth is generally either of a mostly trivial, benevolent nature in games with her friends or aimed at the bullies of our youth who deserve that sort of heavenly punishment, at least as far as the young mind is concerned. And her anger with Jeriven seems perfectly justified, even as Jeriven's innocent, well-behaved manner makes you feel a little bit bad for him being on the receiving end of her tirades. As you would expect from someone who has added considerable moral complexity to a book about Lucifer, Carey has created a lot of characters here who act like regular people, and whose conflicts come from reasonable differences of opinions rather than random plot hooks.
While Carey's script is certainly responsible for no small part of the book's charm, one shouldn't underestimate the work that new talent Liew and veteran talent Hempel bring to the mix. The style at work here is of a somewhat cartoony nature, especially when it comes to Jeriven and the things of his world, but it's grounded in some very realistic characters. The juxtaposition of a believable real world setting with strange things like raining rabbits or an invisible god is perfect. What's even more impressive is that Liew and Hempel modify their style according to the needs of the story, bringing a more innocent quality to the work on Frankie's younger years and a more magical, intricate look to Jeriven's world before he leaves to seek out worshippers.
This issue features the setup of the premise and the characters, but it also hints at the fulcrum upon which the series will turn. A tragedy during Frankie's youth turned into an unusual but less affecting event thanks to Jeriven's intervention, and it appears that years later, the fallout from that event may become a major stress between Frankie and Jeriven. Carey has set the tale up so that it's not just about Frankie, but about her personal god as well, and I expect that both will learn and be affected by the events of this tale. I also suspect that there will be more than a few chuckles along the way.
