4 out of 5

Enigma was an amazing comic book experience for me.  The ending, in typical Milligan irreverence, is rather purposefully distracting from what slowly reveals itself to be a puzzler that’s perhaps less than the sum of its pieces, but that might be part of the package as well.  That I had to hunt and hunt for the last issue of this book (before I was ordering things online, before the trade was re-released) made my eventual “release” in getting to the conclusion that much more affecting, and cast a glowing pall of genius around the story that it’s taken me quite some years of distance to read through.

Because Milligan has written better stories.  Stories that plum more fully into the core of what makes people who they are – part of Enigma’s themes – and do better with tying the concept of twisting reader expectations via narrative trickery – but Enigma nonetheless remains a gorgeous, well-paced story.  Whether or not some of the emptiness that’s revealed by the conclusion is purposeful, or purposefully inevitable, can be up for debate, and that is a bit of meta magic that Peter hasn’t quite been able to dash his stories with before or since, but as our attention isn’t drawn to or away from this by the way the story is presented, it’s not required thinking for appreciation.  So I don’t know what to say about that.

Which might, in its own Enigma-ish way, be the best aspect of the book: there’s not much you can say about it.  Is it a study on influences?  Is it a dissection of the comic book hero?  Is it about something?  Is it about nothing?  All of those questions apply, and yet aren’t necessarily worth debating, because Peter’s half-poetic, half-silly style is fully balanced here, meaning that for every shockingly accurately odd metaphor, there’s a silly forced one.  For every point, not a point, just, perhaps, a random detail.  If we had dug a little deeper with this, perhaps a little darker, it might’ve properly imbalanced the scales by story’s end.  But despite the gore on display through the series, there’s a sense of joy and discovery throughout – which, again, could be part of the point, is part of the balance, etc. etc. – that makes it very pleasant to read, but, perhaps, easy to walk away from.  When I wanted, desperately, for there to be a “point,” Peter provided one with his usual smiling, sardonic verve.  But it’s not really the point, is it?  So now what? heh heh.

Michael Smith is a regular schmoe living a regular life… until the comics he read as a youth – The Enigma – start to come to life.  For some reason, it all seems tied to him, so fie to his regular life, an on to discovering who and what The Enigma is.  Wrap this up in early Duncan Fegredo art – so beautifully sketchy and loopy and loose, and god I miss this version of Fegredo (his sense of lithe motion has totally been maintained and sharpened over the years, but since joining the Hellboy umbrella, I’m worried he’ll loose the Giacometti-like nervousness to his art that caught my eye in the first place – and dot it with some seemingly 4th-wall breaking “Why are you reading this?” captions, some of Milligan’s most heartrendingly apt and disgusting descriptions…  And you get a book that could only have existed during its time and place, only from the Milligan of that time, only from the Vertigo of that time.  Watchmen (to which Enigma has been compared as fightin’ words by Grant Morrison) was a response to its era, but could be written now with the same concepts.  But Enigma would feel out of place now.

Should everyone read it?  No.  Should everyone read it?  Yes.  If I felt moved or unsettled by Enigma, it would be perfect.  Instead, I just know it makes me feel.  ..Kudos?