The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1208: Enigma #4, June 1993

Michael confronts The Truth. Not the actual truth, but the villain The Truth, who looks into Michael's eyes and sees something horrific.

And then the comic starts talking to us.

Have I mentioned how strange a comic Enigma is? It was one of the inaugural titles in the Vertigo Comics imprint, and was coming off the heels of the British Invasion of the late 80s. A lot of criticism looks at these comics in light of the fact that they were coming from Brits who had grown up during Margaret Thatcher's reign, and were speaking back to her and her conservative policies. And it's a culture that produced a good deal of strangeness. Mr. Milligan accompanies Messrs. Gaiman, Moore, Morrison, and Delano across the Atlantic and revitalizes American comics in a way that we are still (literally in the current Doomsday Clock series) dealing with. They were kind of like the continental philosophy of the mainstream comics scene. We can't seem to leave them behind.

So, yes, the comic starts talking to us, and the voice of the narrator becomes increasingly important through this series.

Oh, and Michael has a dream of the Enigma dressed in the skimpiest of bondage gear. Throughout the comic, through the narrator, we hear Michael asking the questions: "What is the truth?" "What is he so afraid of?" When I started teaching queer theory to my classes, I found a version of the initialism that included the idea of Questioning as a queer identity. I think that Michael is going through a version of this identity in today's comic, though it's one inflected by the vitriolic rhetoric of early 90s America. Mr. Milligan is doing a really nice job of portraying a person wrestling with an emotional identity versus a rational identity, in that the rational identity is the one speaking with the voice of culture, but the emotional identity speaks from Michael's heart. When he picks up one of Titus Bird's (the writer of The Enigma and outspoken homosexual!) bondage mags, he is appalled at the way his balls tighten, calling them traitors. His emotional, or physical, identity attempts to assert itself.

More to come...