Zeb Larson reviews Lucas Stand #1…
What’s to Love: Ever since we first saw Sons of Anarchy, we knew creator Kurt Sutter had an amazing comic book story in him. Now we’ve got it in Lucas Stand, his first, original comic book series. If you’ve been looking for a new antihero like Jax Teller to root for, Lucas Stand fits the bill.
What It Is: Lucas Stand is a military vet who can’t reintegrate into society and has emotionally cut himself off from the people he loves. At his lowest, Lucas does something he can’t take back. Hell comes calling, offering him the opportunity to make things right. Demons escaping Hell are upsetting the balance of evil, and now Lucifer has recruited Lucas to send them back. It doesn’t matter in what era the demons escape—World War II, old-timey Hollywood, Vietnam, present day—he must learn to fit in both the past and the present. Given new purpose, Lucas starts to rebuild himself and his life, even as he struggles at the human cost that comes with it.
SEE ALSO: Check out a preview of Kurt Sutter’s Lucas Stand #1
Lucas Stand makes an interesting and clever observation fairly early on in the book by saying that veterans are forced into one of two roles: Captain America, or the broken man. As stifling as the first is, even the second is an archetype whose only depth is his suffering. In effect, he’s not allowed to have any true flaws. So, with that in mind, this book is about a deeply flawed kind of veteran who’s given a peculiar kind of second chance by the forces of Hell itself. I will only be discussing some basic facts of the book in this issue, so there will be no major spoilers.
Lucas Stand is a former veteran and an utter trainwreck of a human being. While some of that is PTSD, most of it good old-fashioned substance abuse in the form of whiskey, opiates and speed. But there are problems out there in the darkness that are bigger than what he’s facing. Demons have escaped from hell and are in hiding across time and space. One of Hell’s agents, Gadrel, decides to outsource some of his work to Lucas, offering to wipe the slate clean in exchange for helping remove these spirits. Doing so will send Lucas hurtling across time and space, and the demons he’s looking for are determined to not be found.
Lucas makes for an interesting and compelling protagonist in no small part because Kurt Sutter breaks away from those tropes that he mentions in the book. Lucas is broken, in a certain sense, but not necessarily because of the terrible things he saw. Nor did he have an abusive childhood. If anything, he had a perfectly normal life until he was injured in war. Once that happened and he turned to booze and pills, then he became the miserable bastard he is when we discover him. The reader can sympathize with his plight, but even he acknowledges that his circumstances are almost entirely the product of choices he made.
So, paradoxically, this will be a story of redemption about a guy literally working on behalf of Hell. That isn’t going to be easy, given that this is a story with a lot of grey intentionally woven into it. Gadrel is who he is, a devil, and one can’t help but distrust somebody from Hell wanting to make a deal. It’s true that these demons don’t come across at all as sympathetic, but they also don’t seem to be creating a lot of havoc (granted, we only meet a few of them) and instead trying just to blend in. Yet Gadrel also appears to be honest, and Lucas doesn’t exactly have a lot of options.
I’m curious as to why exactly Hell feels the need to subcontract its work out to humans. While they likely have no shortage of desperate people, it still does carry a lot of risk in potentially not working out. Is there some reason why Gadrel and his ilk can’t go and chase them down? Or is there a third party we’ve yet to be introduced two, the better half of the hell dichotomy?
Overall, the issue works because of the main character’s self-loathing, as well as the prospect of some divine and infernal combat. If it’s developed right, this could be a real page turner.
Rating: 8.8/10
Zeb Larson
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Originally published June 22, 2016. Updated November 13, 2019.
