Have you noticed how you can't throw a rock these days without hitting an angel?

It's been a while since Wim Wenders put out WINGS OF DESIRE, but Hollywood picked up on it a scant few years back and did their own version in CITY OF ANGELS. John Travolta thrilled and appalled as MICHAEL; THE PROPHECY had Christopher Walken as a pissed off Gabriel taking out his spleen on helpless humanity, and so on.

Meanwhile in children's fiction we've had the ethereal beings in HIS DARK MATERIALS, the confused but charismatic young man in David Almond's SKELLIG, and a whole squadron of angelic teens in the ANGELS UNLIMITED books. It seems we just can't get enough of heaven.

The trend has an added resonance in the comics industry, and in the particular suburb of it (Vertigo) that I mostly inhabit. Obviously there are angels elsewhere in comics (Grant Morrison's Zauriel springs to mind), but Vertigo has had a love affair with Christian eschatology since day one. HELLBLAZER, PREACHER, SANDMAN, LUCIFER, along with miniseries like PROPOSITION PLAYER and FOUR HORSEMEN, have all drawn on Christian imagery and Christian ideas for some or all of their set-up, characters and backdrops.

What are we to make of this? Are we living in a secular age or not? Is part of the appeal of the Vertigo titles that they address a community of faith?

'You can't throw a rock these days without hitting an angel.' On the whole I'd say not - and a moment's thought about the titles listed above shows why. PREACHER deals with issues of faith and salvation, but it's spikily iconoclastic and irreverent. HELLBLAZER shows Heaven and Hell as rival establishments, both characterised by authoritarian rigidity and lack of vision. My own comic, LUCIFER, uses the dysfunctional relationship between Lucifer and God as a way to explore issues of freedom, dependency and control.

Neil Gaiman's SANDMAN is a more complex example. In Gaiman's universe, the gods are created and sustained by human belief. The Endless - living embodiments of the universal poles of human nature and human existence - stand above them and outlast them. But Jehovah and his dark counterpart Lucifer exist in a different relationship to the Endless, and Dream sees Lucifer as an adversary against whom he cannot prevail. Obviously then, the argument goes, the God of Christianity and the gods of every cult else are two very different propositions.

But the evidence for a Christian, or Judaeo-Christian, perspective in SANDMAN is on the whole pretty thin. During the 'Season of Mists' storyline, God's only claim on Hell is that he made it in the first place, and he presses this claim to Dream in much the same way that all the other powers do. Other stories, notably 'A Dream of a Thousand Cats', make it clear that reality itself is made and remade continuously by human consciousness, and the Endless are no less subject to its power than the gods (a point more forcefully made by Dream to Desire in 'The Doll's House'). All things fall and are built again - and God's act of creation (as we learn in Brief Lives) emphatically wasn't the start of everything: just the latest deal in a long game.

'Christian symbols had power for many of us while we were growing up.' So we're left with an apparent conundrum: a number of creative teams having extensive recourse to aspects of Christian cosmology, but seldom or never in the service of a straightforward Christian (or for that matter anti-Christian) message or in the exploration of Christian themes.

I think the answer lies at least partly in aesthetics rather than religion. Writers explore ideas through character, interaction, dialogue, image and event. They add weight and urgency to those ideas through juxtaposition, repetition, explicit and implicit comment - and underpinning myth. And this is where the strong appeal of Christian eschatology stems from, it seems to me. Angels and demons and Christ and the Janus-faced god of the old and new testaments are ideas that had power for many of us while we were growing up, and some of that power remains still, whatever belief systems we may have scraped together for ourselves since.

Moreover, we know that this isn't something that holds only for us. A large part of our audience will have had as much contact with the central mythos of Christianity as we had - perhaps more. They won't necessarily be believers, or ex-believers, but it's hard to grow up in the USA, or Britain, or Europe, without being immersed in the symbols and the narratives of the Christian faith.

"The beauty of Earth is the beauty of every paradise", says Wallace Stevens in one of his essays - meaning that when we try to imagine a blissful life after death we extrapolate from what we know of pleasure and happiness here on Earth. The opposite process seems to take place sometimes when writers look for a handle on human experience: they reach for mythological counterparts in which to express and anchor it.

'Creators seldom adopt Christian cosmology in the service of Christian themes.' So in the character of the Saint of Killers, and his vexed relationship with God, PREACHER confronts the arbitrary cruelty of human life, the scars it leaves on the soul, and the way our personal experience of that cruelty can come to outweigh any intellectual sense of a wider purpose or meaning to suffering. You could have explored all those themes without troubling God at all, but the image of the grizzled gunman walking to a final showdown with the creator of the world is completely unforgettable. And it's the image that makes the themes echo and re-echo in your mind both while you're reading the comic and after you've finished.

The same is true of the central moment in SANDMAN's 'Season of Mists', when Lucifer has Dream cut off his wings and resigns the rule of Hell. The dilemma he voices here, of wanting to be involved in the planning rather than being just a detail in the plan, goes far beyond the traditional role of the Devil in the Christian world view - but it's a dilemma that is part of every human being's experience of the painful ambivalence of puberty.

Seen in this light, the borrowing by Vertigo writers of Judaeo-Christian characters, settings and ideas is one instance of something much wider: because for an underpinning myth to function, and to enrich and deepen a text (whether book or comic or film or whatever), all that's necessary is for both writer and reader to know it well enough to hang meanings on it.

Both SANDMAN and HELLBLAZER have plumbed other religions and mythologies for imagery and situations, and so do many other comics, LUCIFER among them. If the familiar landscapes of Heaven and Hell, the angels and the devils, tend to dominate, I'm convinced that this isn't part of a conscious or unconscious cultural bias. It's because the power and usefulness of a metaphor is in direct proportion to the weight of meaning it already has for the writer and the audience.

Nonetheless, I wonder sometimes when we're going to see an equally rich plethora of comic books underpinned by Hindu or Buddhist, Muslim or Shintoist frames of reference in the same way. Roger Zelazny's spectacular science fiction novel, LORD OF LIGHT, shows just how powerful an imaginative tool they can be in the right hands - and they'd also be less prone to the simplified dualities of good and evil that are the pitfalls of Christianity's central myth.

Yes, yes, I know. I'm really not in a position to throw out a challenge like that. People who live in stained glass houses...

Mike Carey is the writer on DC Vertigo's LUCIFER and HELLBLAZER.

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