Enigma: The Best Marvel Comic of the 1970s
The best Marvel comic of the 1970s was published in 1993 by Vertigo, an imprint of DC Comics. Neither the writer, Peter Milligan, nor the artist Duncan Fegredo, had ever written for Marvel, though they would each eventually go on to do work for the company. [1] So what makes it a 1970s Marvel comic? And why is that particular era worthy of attention? At this point, Marvel’s famous impresario Stan Lee would probably write something along the lines of, ”Follow me, True Believer!” This book, however, is about the comics produced immediately after Lee’s heyday, and, in any case, Lee’s prose always set my teeth on edge. Instead, let’s just entertain this paradox for a little while.
The comic in question is Enigma, a miniseries whose eight issues were published between March and October, eventually collected into a trade paperback that has been in and out print since 1995.[2] Before landing at Vertigo, Enigma was initially supposed to inaugurate the Touchmark imprint planned by Disney, but Disney cancelled the line before printing a single page. The Disney connection is amusing, not just because the comic’s content is a far cry from the House of Mouse, but because Disney is now Marvel’s parent company.
Why, then, start off a book about Marvel in the 1970s with a DC comic from the 1990s? Nearly everything that makes Enigma an artistic success is the culmination of trends developed at Marvel two decades before (during Milligan’s adolescence), and yet the same Marvel-derived features that give Enigma its strength arrive in a form that even the pathologically mellow editors at Marvel would never have let see the light of day.[3] Seen from the perspective of 1970s Marvel, the artistic triumph of Enigma is bittersweet, as Milligan and Fegredo materialized the aspirations that the publishing industry, the Comics Code, and the broader culture never let their predecessors achieve in their purest form.
Enigma is the story of Michael Smith, a young man whom the narrator describes as "a tree ape who lost most of his hair and now has nightmares about black horses and cancer.” Michael has a dull telephone repair job and an even duller love life (he and his girlfriend have sex once a week, on Saturdays), but he is shaken out of his complacency by the news that his city is plagued with supervillains. This is a shock; not only is Engima set in a world without superheroes, but these particular villains are familiar to Michael from his childhood comics reading. He comes to repair a phone for a man who suddenly turns into The Head, a villain who sucks peoples’ brains out through their noses. Later a group of worshippers are massacred in church by a man calling himself The Truth. Soon a model named Victoria Yes is transformed into Envelope Girl, who enfolds people into her manila body and sends them far away.
Attacked by The Head, Michael is saved by a mysterious, handsome man in a domino mask: Enigma. Enigma was his favorite superhero as a child, and over the course of the miniseries, he finds himself falling in love with the masked man. During the course of his adventures, Michael meets Titus Bird, the gay, washed-up ex-comics writer who created Enigma back in the Seventies. Eventually they realize that Enigma was born the superpower offspring of incestuous rape; as a baby, he accidentally uses his reality-altering powers to destroy someone’s face, and ends up thrown down a well, where he grows up with only lizards for company and food.
When he gets older, he finds the ruins of Michael’s childhood home (it had been destroyed in a fire), and in this gutted husk of a building, he discovers the Enigma comics that Michael’s mother gave him as consolation for his father’s absence. The comics create an emotional bond with Michael, while also inspiring the future Enigma to model himself on their contents. Enigma’s insane and monstrous mother had been in a mental hospital this entire time, and now has been drawing on Enigma’s power to free herself and seek revenge on her grown son. Enigma made Michael fall in love with him in the hope that this humanizing emotion would somehow also tame his mother. At the end of the comic, Michael, Enigma, and Titus Bird walk into a field to confront the mother, but the reader never finds out how the conflict ends.
If this plot summary sounds convoluted and farfetched, then it has done its job. The twists and turns, the introduction of new elements that seem to come out of the blue, and the alternation between apparent cynicism and rank sentimentality were par for the course in some of the most intriguing comics to come out of Seventies Marvel. Milligan and Fegredo are also trafficking in the kind of pseudo-profound allegory that marred some of those same comics: The Enigma fights The Truth in a church, the Truth dies in the church. But they also let the reader (and even Michael) know just how trite such allegory is. In Issue 3, Michael says,
“You know, Titus, those comics really meant something to me when I was a kid. They seem to speak to me.
“What did The Enigma mean, huh? What were you trying to say?”
“Sorry to disappoint you, Mike, but they didn’t mean anything.
“I was half outa my mind on dope when I did them.
"The Head, The Truth, Envelope Girl, even Enigma himself, they’re the products of a sick and drug-crazed mind..”
Michael continues to press Titus, demanding to know how the unpublished fourth issue of the original comic would have dealt with Enigma’s apparent death. Titus’s response:
"Damn, I don’t know. Don’t get so excited. It was only a comic.”
Titus may have dreamed up The Truth when stoned off his gourd, but Enigma recognizes a different, lower-case truth: the possibility that a comic can be both profound and vapid, tacky and beautiful. This dialogue between creator and fan reminds us of the powerful impact that imperfect art can have on a reader of a certain age, a metaphor that is rendered literal when Enigma comes to life and seduces the now-grown fan. As detractors of such “trash culture” as comics have argued for decades, that influence can also be pernicious: soon the media report the appearance of suicidal cultists calling themselves Enigmatics, who have been mining the original Enigma comics for hidden meanings. When Titus hears that a young Enigmatic shoots himself after saying, “And then what?”, he realizes that this is a quote from his own work. Fegredo treats us to a page of the “original” comic, complete with garish colors, square jaws, and tacky Seventies leisurewear. In it, Enigma stand on a rooftop talking to a "fat cat” who recites all his goals and plans (“I’ll be the owner of all this, all this mine, all mine”). After each of the fat cat’s statements, Enigma asks, “And then what?” Finally, Enigma renders his judgement:
“You know what impresses me about you? Your ability to be as pathetic as you are and not want to kill yourself.
“If I were you, I’d have to kill myself.’ (4:22) [4]
This and other brief glimpses of the “original” Enigma comics highlight one of the things that the Seventies version tries to do, and that the 1990s comic accomplishes: it deploys a superhero figure in a conflict that is abstract and philosophical, rather than simply a fight over property or national boundaries. The mode in the "original" stories is heavy-handed allegory, while the 90s version manages to invoke the naive allegorical constructs of its (imaginary) predecessor while both mocking them and developing them further, in the knowing, self-conscious way that challenging 90s comics often affected.
Next: The Voice of the Lizard is Heard in Our Land
Notes
[1] Milligan, who could continue to write excellent comics at Vertigo (Shade, the Changing Man; The Human Target) did eventually publish with Marvel, most notably his run on X-Force/X-Statix. Fegredo has drawn for Marvel as well, but only on a few occasions (twice reuniting with Milligan). Neither of them could be considered closely identified with the company or its characters.
[2] The most recent edition came out in 2014. There does not appear to be a legal digital edition. On October 4, 2019, Dark Horse comics announced that former Vertigo editor Karen Berger would be bringing out a deluxe edition of Enigma in the company’s Berger Books line. ()
[3] This is a reference to Marvel’s editorial staff before Jim Shooter’s ascension to Editor-in-Chief in 1978.
[4] More than pretentious, this scene is also unoriginal. Titus (or Milligan) is giving his readers a superheroic update of Edwin Arlington Robinson’s 1897 poem “Richard Corey,” which would have been more familiar to contemporary readers through its adaptation as a Simon and Garfunkel song in 1965.