5 out of 5

I would ask where this version of Peter Milligan had been hiding, but it was always there, as less effective expressions of the emotions and thoughts carried out in this most excellent three parter.  This came at the tail end of a second highlight period in Pete’s career, the winding down of the Vertigo years, and though Shade and Enigma get all the attention from that time, they could be seen as warm ups for the concise tales of  horror and cynical social comedy he would deliver via Face and this book, though I would argue that even Face‘s concepts could be rolled into this mini.

Focusing specifically on Enigma, there’s a lot of crossover with Girl, from the meta What’s Its All About? questioning to the mercurial sexuality explorations and even the structure of the ending, but Enigma, woven into its narrative, sets the reader up to expect a lot more than it delivers; Girl avoids that but delivers the same emotional wallop.  It’s the most direct thing Pete has written, and yet it doesn’t sacrifice one bit of his trademark goofiness.

Is the key that our narrator is a fifteen year old girl?  Is Milligan’s flippant, fukk-it narrative style more digestible if imagined as that of a youth’s?  Heh, very possibly maybe.

Girl is about Simone, resident of Bollockstown, imaginative and disillusioned and ready to burn down the local factory in a bit of protest against the pointlessness of life.  But before that, lets step back a few days to see how we got here…  An insane and tawdry tale plays out before we wrap around, involving talking dolls and devil babies and exploding corpses and Simone’s twin sister, Polly, who seems to want to encourage Simone to get up to all bad things.  Milligan avoids his tendency to ditch plot points with a lampshade comment by structuring Girl into episodic flashes; with Ellie de Ville on lettering, this makes the book very 2000 AD-y, which is not a bad thing at all, but also frees Pete up to muse without having to worry about transitions.  Turns out he’s pretty good at musing; turns out he can deliver some downright devious thoughts when he’s not trying to be overly clever and sell us on some wish-fulfillment narrative version of himself (e.g. the male narrators of most of his stories).  Simone comes alive on the page, and more importantly, though the story diverts into the dream / reality identity crises Pete loves, her personality is so strong that its her general fitfulness and dissatisfaction we come to empathize with.  That this all ends up perfectly aligning with a murder mystery narrative is the result, in my mind, of this being Pete’s darkest tale.  He generally provides a light at the end of the tunnel that undercuts his points, even if that light is just provided by snark.  Girl feels like he just let his mood takeover, and so the narration gets to be more organic as a result.

I also can’t imagine this tale as not told by Duncan Fegredo.  Which isn’t always true.  Enigma had a weird tone veering between ugly comedy and poetic beauty, and I don’t know that Fegredo was the best choice for the latter.  But Girl revels in syringes and trash heaps and broken dreams; Duncan’s style – and I love this era of his art – of sketchy lines and angled fabric and hair and scruffy humans a perfect match for this world, perfectly capable of slipping into Simone’s fantastical imaginings when need be.

The only thing painful about reading Girl is that its so spot on – so mean, so precise – that you want everything Milligan’s written to prove capable of the same effect.  Then again, plenty of writers go their whole career without quite saying what they’re trying to, if trying to make a point at all.  That Pete and Duncan and Ellie hit the nail squarely on the head for these three issues is thus a massive achievement.  Absolutely worth a back-bin search to check it out.