Satan

Did you know that many Christians object to the Devil? It's strange but true. Since he's a character who originated in their own favorite book, you'd think they'd be even more invested in him than the rest of us. But apparently, like so many over-invested nerds, Evangelical Christians are only interested in a version of the Devil that lines up with their reading of the source material, which in this case means not only a bad guy, but the worst guy of all time, who's also responsible for all other bad things that have ever happened in the world. Noted anti-everything trolls One Millions Moms, a group whose membership is not limited to actual moms and whose actual numbers remain vague, have chosen Fox's Lucifer, a show based on a comic written by Mike Carey that was based on a comic written by Neil Gaiman, as their latest target for one of their "let's give this thing we hate as much free publicity as possible" campaigns.

Lucifer. Mephistopheles. Beelzebub. Auld Hornie. Satan. Nick. Clootie. Whatever you choose to call him, the devil has a long and storied (pun intended) history, from his humble beginnings as a nameless adversary in the book of Job to a tempter in the desert to the spokesmodel for canned ham. The prince of the power of the air has been at the center of stories for thousands of years, canonical, deuterocanonical, and extracanonical alike. His status as an instantly recognizable symbol and a royalty-free denizen of the public domain have made him an irresistible go-to in stories where an ultimate evil is needed, including in comics.

When Archie Comics announced a while back that it was relaunching its flagship character with a new series by Mark Waid and Fiona Staples, we all knew that the current series was going to come to an end, and today, Archie let us know exactly when that's happening. This June will mark the final issue for Archie, ending at... #666! Could this mean that Archie's universe gets rebooted due to some kind of sinister pact with the Devil himself?! Has the Author of All Lies finally wreaked his hellish revenge on Archie and his crew for all those weird religious comics they appeared in back in the '70s?Is Reggie actually Satan, as I have so long suspected?

I love Lois Lane so much. She's arguably the single greatest love interest in the history of comics, and like so many readers, I can't really get enough of her long-running love story with... uh, that guy. Jeez, it's on the tip of my tongue. What's his name. You know, he has the red cape, his name starts with an S, he's got powers far beyond those of mortal men? Oh! That's right: Satan.

The last year or so of Archie comics has been defined by one thing: the supernatural. Not only did we get Afterlife With Archie, which saw Sabrina the Teenage Witch dabbling in necromancy and inadvertently bringing about a zombie apocalypse that saw Jughead ripping out throats at a school dance, but it was so popular that we got a separate ongoing series about Sabrina dealing with the Lovecraftian horrors that result from witchcraft. To the casual reader, this might seem like it's a pretty big departure from the usual Archie storylines about sharing milkshakes and having too many dates to the movies, but those of us who really know Archie Comics know that it's been there all along. Or, at the very least, it's been there since 1962, in that story where Betty Cooper literally sold her soul to the Devil so that she could make out with Archie.

Censorship is a serious issue. It's one of the reasons that we here at ComicsAlliance always show our support to organizations like the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund and rally behind creators who have been subjected to governmental restrictions on their work. Occasionally, though, there are incidents of people pushing to get books banned that slide right past concerning and directly into the world of hilarious ineptitude. Such is the case with Reverend Phillip Missick of Texas's amazingly named King of Saints Tabernacle Church, who pushed for the Cleveland, TX public library to remove manga like Matsuri Hino's Vampire Knight from its library, owing, of course, to it being a demonic product of Satan that would drag otherwise saintly children directly into the gaping maw of Hell itself. That, of course, is nothing new. What makes it amazing is that he didn't stop there, going so far as to declare pretty much everything around the manga to be the product of Satan, including a few Harry Potter toys, a bouquet of dried roses, and the actual room itself to be "occultic and demonic."

Batman's villains are unquestionably the greatest bad guys in comics. The best of them are compelling, complex characters in their own right that can work in a variety of stories, and even the second-stringers tend to be, at the very least, visually interesting...