THE DEVIL’S WORK
The delicate art of adaptation
The Lucifer TV show has been criticised for having only the bare minimum in common with the comic book of the same name, but Mike Carey, writer of the Lucifer comic, knows better than most that adaptation means reinvention. He confesses that, while he’s seen and enjoyed some episodes of Lucifer, he’s “not following it religiously. No pun intended.”
Carey, of course, was himself adapting Lucifer from Neil Gaiman’s Sandman, where the character had first been introduced. On the subject of adaptation, Carey says: “I’ve done it enough times to know now that you can’t translate something straight from one medium to another, you have to figure out what works in the new medium and play to that… I don’t resent the fact that the show’s gone in a different direction from the comic. I think it had to. And ultimately I think that Lucifer the comic went in a somewhat different direction to Sandman, although it was always a joy to write a continuation of some of those stories. I still think that