About

Good Guy Lucifer is an advice animal image macro series that features an image of a man wearing a suit, drinking a martini with angel wings on his back who is meant to represent the Biblical character Lucifer. The captioned text typically references stories from the Bible where Lucifer performs actions that may seem altruistic.

Origin

The first image macro was submitted to the r/atheism^[2] subreddit on October 23rd, 2011. The original image comes from the cover of the 16th issue of the DC Comics series "Lucifer"^[4] written by Mike Carey. The cover illustration depicts the character Lucifer and was drawn by artist Christopher Moeller^[5].

Religious Debate

One of the earliest religious debates concerning Lucifer's moral character stems from several biblical passages where Lucifer is described as a fallen angel in Isaiah 14:12-15^[6]. This passage, and other actions performed by Lucifer in the bible, has sparked discussion among Christians about the content of Lucifer's character.^[7] These actions or variations of it can also be found back in the Good Guy Lucifer image macros.

12 How you have fallen from heaven,
morning star, son of the dawn!
You have been cast down to the earth,
you who once laid low the nations!
13 You said in your heart,
“I will ascend to the heavens;
I will raise my throne
above the stars of God;
I will sit enthroned on the mount of assembly,
on the utmost heights of Mount Zaphon.
14 I will ascend above the tops of the clouds;
I will make myself like the Most High.”
15 But you are brought down to the realm of the dead,
to the depths of the pit.

Spread

The first image macro was featured on the LOL God blog^[3] on October 23rd, 2011. It was subsequently featured on the podcast series An American Atheist^[8] and media aggregators like Buzzfeed^[9] and Ranker^[10] that week. The series gained popularity on both the r/atheism^[11] and /r/adviceanimals^[12] subreddits, as well as the microblogging site Tumblr.^[13] A Quickmeme^[14] page has 181 submissions as of November 1st, 2011.

Notable Derivatives

Template

Search Interest

Search Interest for Good Guy Lucifer started in October 2011, the same month the image macro first appeared on Reddit.

External References