J.G. Keely's Reviews > Enigma

'Shade' is still The Book for me, when it comes to comics. I've read Moore, Gaiman, Ellis, and Morrison, but none were ever struck as true. In terms of humor, depth of psychology, insight, and variance in ideas, only Moore's 'Swamp Thing' comes close, but it's still not as unusual.

Yet in the intervening years, I didn't return to Milligan. He is less visible than those other authors, and my stumbling across Shade when I did was a mere coincidence; Only recently have any collections been made available, and those only cover the weakest part.

But it is only natural to return to the source. I have sought elsewhere for his equal and missed him, so my road leads back to Milligan, and it would be hard to pick a more remarkable book than Enigma.

If Shade parallels Swamp Thing, then Enigma is a thematic companion to Watchmen, and flat-out superior, if we believe Morrison's sidelong jab at Moore. I wouldn't say their styles invite a one-for-one comparison, but I do agree that Milligan's is the most literary voice in comics.

Despite being shorter, Milligan's deconstruction it is less narrow in focus, less suggestive, more organic and revelatory, less drunk on its own political transgression. 'Enigma' plays with power, reality, and the farce of superheroes, but is drawn not with the cold, harsh lines of watchmen, but a confused and lifelike dream.

I have come to know good writers by this sign: that they make inescapable a vision you never could have accepted without them. Milligan has this kind of insight, and wit, and a wry self-consciousness--the sort that Morrison has always counterfeited in an attempt to reverse-engineer cleverness.

There is rarely a false note in Milligan. He speaks with post-modern realism, always playing with the audience, turning words back on themselves, revealing the world through the inadequacy of dualism. His works have verisimilitude in their details, in their absurdity, in their unwillingness to settle on a single view.

This book is often difficult, often unpleasant, I can't say I always enjoyed it, but can easily say that it was good: well-written with a strong voice, unpredictable, it forced me to think and to feel at once.

Fegredo's art is likewise difficult. He is a very skilled draughtsman--deceptively skilled. The art is messy, scattered, and free--sometimes the story gets lost in the experiment--but when he needed to, he could hit the high points, and do it well. Beauty, confusion, sex, pain, and death play across the page, each recognizable, each palpable.

It's remarkable that a mainstream publisher had the courage to publish such an unusual book, and speaks of a strong editorial staff, concerned not merely with their market, but with the evolution of the medium. I can only hope that publishers and companies of the future will recognize the importance not just of sales, but of the long-lasting effect of making available original, adventurous visions, like Enigma.

At first, I found the story somewhat all too similar to Shade--and while I enjoyed Shade, I needed Milligan to do something new, to challenge himself as he had continuously done in that series. But Shade also started slow, so I kept with it.

It unfolds its struts, built of surprising, human moments, each poignant beneath the a wild, surreal, magical canopy. Finally, Milligan manages to do the hardest thing in writing: to deliver the ending the work deserves. There is resolution, yet we realize that we already knew it: the mysteries had been germinating in our minds, and now that the end is here, we wish we could change the question that we had once begged him to answer.

But the new question is already lost on the wind, and it is in that moment between conclusion and the implication of something greater that we find ourselves utterly gripped. He takes us on a journey, we see the sights--discrete moments and memories--and then he drops us off where he picked us up. Yet, on disembarking, we cannot help but feel that in some indescribable, nagging way, the world he has kindly returned us to is not the one we left.

My Suggested Readings in Comics