The Voice of the Lizard Is Heard in Our Land
Enigma excels in the two other categories that defined the best of Marvel’s 1970s output: interiority and voice. The fact that the comic spends so much time in Michael Smith’s head is not at all surprising to the 90s reader, but it is something that only started to become mainstream two decades earlier. Enigma thematizes the very idea of interiority or the inner life, while also commenting on the very aspects of escapist comics literature that drew the opprobrium of its critics after World War II. The Head is an avatar of expanded consciousness (made literal in his ever-expanding, grotesque cranium), and he is also a threat: he sucks out people brains. Envelope Girl, in addition to her obvious sexual implications, enfolds characters (and, by extension, the reader) inside her own internal world, only to send them somewhere they never intended to go. And they are joined by the Interior League, a group of terrorists who sneak into people’s homes and rearrange their furniture.
The Interior League turn out to be the only villains who are the product of Michael’s rather than Titus’s imagination: he made them up when he was a child. Like all the villains, they are externalized through Enigma’s power, but they also stand in for what both Enigma the character and Enigma the comic can do: they enter other people’s minds and reconfigure the internal architecture that they find there. When Enigma brings such characters to life, he is manifesting Titus (the writer’s) and Michael (the reader’s) imaginations and making them part of the world of others. This is precisely what the would-be auteurs of Marvel in the 1970s were attempting.
Intimately connected with the question of interiority is the establishment of a narrative or authorial voice. By “authorial voice,” I mean a perspective or worldview that can be inferred from the texts and attributed to the person or persons to whom authorship is ascribed. While an authorial voice distinct from that of Stan Lee was a novelty at Marvel in the early 1970s (and increasing suppressed by the decade’s end), it is the narrative voice that is more artistically noteworthy. The best Marvel writers after the 1960s developed approaches to narration that were neither an ostensibly neutral third-person omniscient nor the carnival huckster persona established by Stan Lee .
Enigma features a narrative voice so remarkable and puzzling that one of the challenges to the reader is to make sense out of this strange perspective that never seems aligned to any particular character. Already by the second page of the first issue, the narrator is dropping inventive similes that simply have to be the product of an individual perspective:
“The well was like an old man who’d lost the desire to get dressed in the mornings.
"The well would sit around all day in its pajamas waiting for something to happen.”
A few pages later, referring to Michael:
“Sometimes he feels like a rumor drifting through a world of hard facts.
“What’s the point of you, Michael?"
“The old Michael Smith is a pair of trousers, worn by another man…”
“It’s lucky that this is the kind of story that follows its characters into the bathroom…
“Look, he’s sitting on the toilet, clutching a you-know what.
“It comforts him. No, don’t laugh. Oh, all right, go ahead, laugh.”
On the first page of issue 5 (that is, right after the miniseries’ halfway point), the narrator beings to address their mysterious nature:
“Do I sound detached? Indifferent? I’m not, believe me. I’ll tell you a secret: I’m not a distant narrator, aloof from the action of this story…I'm a part of this story.
“I’m a character in this story. Don’t worry, you’ll understand everything by the end, possibly even before the end. For now, let’s turn the volume up…."
The narrator’s identity is another enigma, one that the reader cannot possible solve alone. Only at the very end do we learn that this odd narrative voice is the result of an offhand simile worthy of…the narrator. Enigma tries to explain to Michael and Titus what it was like for him when he discovered the world outside the well:
“When I saw the world that I was going to have to inhabit I almost fainted.
“It was like you waking up and finding yourself in a ward full of frothing idiots, and knowing that you would have to spend the rest of your days with them.
“See that lizard, the green, plump one? Imagine if he had a human’s intelligence. Imagine if he knew this entire story…
“But could only communicate it to the minuscule brains of his fellow lizards."
Whereupon Enigma uses his powers to bring the lizard to consciousness, turning him into the comic’s narrator. The last page show us one lizard haranging a few others, trying to tell them what is going on, but lamenting that they are too stupid to figure it out. The last lines are also the series’ first: “You could say it all started in Arizona. Twenty-five years ago. On a farm…” Now the reader (or really, the re-reader) is finally in a position to understand why the narrator speaks the way he does, why he takes such a dismissive tone when addressing his audience, and why he keeps mentioning lizards.
It’s a nice trick, but does it amount to anything? I would argue that it does, and that, once again, it involves the virtues and vice of Seventies Marvel. The lizard narrator is a fine instantiation of what the Russian Formalists called skaz, a device involving a narrative persona that could not entirely be identified with the author, but was not a direct participant in the story. The skaz narrator’s language and tone are always marked in some way that differentiates it from anything that could pass as neutral. Skaz was also a device used liberally by Marvel Comics writers, especially Stan Lee; those who came after him faced the challenge of working within the tradition he helped create while establishing a narrative tone of their own.
Seventies Marvel writers escaped from Lee’s shadow by embracing one important aspect of his narration: Lee’s narrator loved words. This love was unabashedly unsophisticated, expressing itself primarily in alliteration (“Make mine Marvel!”) and an attempt at post-Beatnik informality. The writers who came after him also loved words, but theirs was a love informed by modernist (and, eventually, post-modernist) experimentation. This is certainly the case for Milligan as well; having already delivered a Joycean pastiche in his previous DC miniseries Skreemer (1989, with art by Brett Ewins and Steve Dillon), Milligan borrows the circular narrative structure of Finngegan’s Wake for the beginning and end of Enigma. More to the point, his lizard narrator is playful, reveling in absurdity at every opportunity.
The all-knowing lizard who tells the story of Enigma provides a counterpoint of misanthropic cynicism to the otherwise humanist, life-affirming character arc of Michael and Enigma. This balance between negativity and sentimentality was a particular hallmark of Steve Gerber, arguably Marvel’s best writer in the 1970s, but also found its way into the work of his colleagues.
Equally important for our purposes is that this crosstime comparison between Enigma and Seventies Marvel is fundamentally unfair to Milligan’s predecessors. The aesthetic success of Enigma is no doubt a credit to Milligan and Fegredo, but it would also have been impossible in the conditions under which the Marvel creators labored two decades earlier. While Enigma is an obviously circular narrative, Milligan and Fegredo were able to create a comic that, at least as an object on paper, had a clear beginning, middle, and end. They did not have to find a way to include Spider-Man in their second issue. They were not beholden to a broad corporate editorial policy, nor did they have to worry about how well Enigma Underoos might sell (although, come to think of it…). They wrote for a market that understood that comics could be created for adults, a market whose very existence would be unthinkable without the efforts of their Seventies predecessors.
Predicated on a nonexistent comic book with a mysterious protagonist whose adventures straddle the line between the pretentious and the profound, while telling the story of one man’s development as a conscious subject (Enigma) and another man’s awakening to his own sexuality (Michael), Enigma is a story of adolescence. [1] For the North American comics industry, the best output of Marvel in the 1970s was the adolescence of its chosen medium. Brilliant, awkward, clumsy, and moving, these comics have never quite fit into standard narrative of the maturation of American “graphics novels.” They are the acne-ridden photos of youth on the cusp of a beautiful maturity; when we remove them from our photo album, we never really see how the child became an adult.
Next: Oh, You Pretty Things
Note
[1] Michael’s sexual orientation should still be seen as something of an open question. While it is possible to read Enigma as the story of Michael’s move from repression to queer acceptance, Enigma all but admits in the last issue that he made Michael gay so that their love could be possible. The context of LGBTQ progress, especially in a medium that had allowed so little room for queer representation, encourages a sympathetic reading (as does the use of the “mind control” trope in some slash fiction). But imagine how this story would read if Michael were female: Enigma uses his mind-control powers to make her fall in love with him. Instead of liberation, we have coercion and even rape (as in the notorious Avengers story in which Ms. Marvel gives birth to a baby who rapidly grows up and becomes the man who brainwashed her into falling in love with him).