One of the best mini-series ever. It's an eye-opening, and totally different comics experience. It takes the superhero mythos and turns it on its head. The art by Duncan Fegredo is gorgeous and the overall look of the book will stick with you long after you've finished the last page.

I can see that this probably felt ground-breaking when it was released in the 90s, and being incoherent and filled with sexual violence was still transgressive. The banal main character was probably intended to give the narrative a more literary feel, the Everyman contrasted with the usual larger-than-life Superhero (or Villain). The trouble is, he was boring to spend time with. I felt vaguely sorry for peripheral characters, Michael's girlfriend the girlfriend of the cop, but they were so flat

Perhaps best known as the scribe of the surreal allegorical series Shade, the Changing Man, Peter Milligan's masterpiece remains Enigma. Mired in a tedious life of routine, Michael Smith inexplicably encounters his favorite childhood comic book hero, the formerly 2-D, four-color Enigma, now very much alive and in full color. Teaming with the hero's comic creator, Smith obsessively attempts to uncover the secret behind Enigma's improbable existence. After encountering an insanity-inducing psychop...

This comic changed my life when I was in high school. One of my first tattoos was a reference to Enigma. I don't even have words for how much it means to me.

Michael is a very mundane gentleman begins to awaken when characters from his favorite comic book come alive and start murdering people until each time they are stopped by The Enigma. Is Michael somehow causing this? Is it the writer of The Enigma? Michael goes on a journey of discovery while these oddball villains kill lots of people. This was originally published back in the 90's, in the early days of Vertigo when comics could be strange and odd and good.

A cult classic, Enigma was originally published as an eight-issue miniseries in 1993 as part of the kick-off of DC's Vertigo imprint. Its writer, Peter Milligan, then best-known for Shade the Changing Man, was part of comics' British invasion following the mid-1980s breakthrough of Alan Moore. Though Milligan never attained the fame of his fellow Vertigo writers, Neil Gaiman and Grant Morrison, he wrote comics that were equal to theirs if less obvious in their aesthetic effects and meanings. Mor...

Quite possibly one of the best comic books I've read. It seems at first like a low-brand recreation of Watchmen and it... transcends it? As opposed to simply being a deconstruction of the superhero genre, Enigma also touches on personal themes of sexuality and the self. While Watchmen empathizes on the structures of the world (the one of society, the one of narratives, in the search for meaning on the outside...), Enigma goes for the individual (the one of the self, and the meaning in ourselves)...

Enigma is a love story of all the tedious people - those who don't go out the small circle they live in and lead a life as one stagnant stream of consciousness. Micheal Smith is woken up from such a life when his childhood comic book hero comes to life. It isn't the plot but the tenacity with which Milligan moves the narration. It is a dogged effort complete with raw apathy, blood, gore and a harsh exposition of the world. The supervillains who wreck the day are mirrors that exemplify our own th...

i wasn't expecting this to be a heavy read i was expecting it to be really good it was highly recommended but not that good or that deep , and i am pretty sure if i read it again i will discover a lot of things that i might have missed This is a beautiful story about Life , self , sexuality all written in a beautiful philosophical way in a setting filled with mystery.I think it would be an insult calling this a super hero comic its much much more than thatThe story revolves mainly around a norma...

Goes pretty well with the musical group of the same name, too.

Ah, a blast back from the days when Vertigo meant not only mature content, but also weird content. this is very much both, although more on the weird side. A short-lived comic book's characters have come to life in murderous (and heroic) form, and Michael Smith manages to be at the center of the mystery, even as it reveals his own inner secrets. This book is no-holds-barred weird (wait until you figure out who the narrator is), with all kinds of metatextual references and self-references. The st...

Imagine waking up. Now imagine waking up for the first time. That's kind of what reading ENIGMA felt like, especially towards the end. It wears the cuts and drapes of a dark superhero comic. Until the cowl is lifted, to reveal . . . a phantasmagoria. I wanted to feel annoyed. I usually am, when it's all just "an elaborate metaphor." [That's not the case with this story, but close enough.] I hope I'm not spoiling anything by saying questions about sexuality and mundanity are raised. A really enga...

'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 avai...

Brilliant on every level. Such a great and beautiful book.

There are maybe four main things I remember about Jeff Ayers, the manager of Forbidden Planet, my go-to comic shop when I lived in NYC. The first is that Jeff gave me a student discount long after I graduated from college, and he would instruct the other people on register to do so when he saw me. The second is that he was very gracious about not wanting to sell my self-published comic in his shop, but he was willing to let me put flyers for it on the front counter. The third is the time Grant M...

Absolute masterpiece, one of the best things I've ever read. Peter Milligan is just an outstanding writer. Vertigo in the 90's was something else, something special.

Enigma is very strange and very different. It is a story about superheroes and sexuality. The less I say about this strange story-the better. If you like strange tales-this one is right up your alley.Michael Smith is a boring person stuck in a bad relationship. One day his world changes as villains and a hero straight out of the pages of a favorite comic of his begin to manifest. Is this real? Is he causing it? This starts a strange and twisted tale about Michael looking for answers to his past

3.5/5The promise of revelations about the Enigma keep you entrapped for most of the comic, and then around 3/4 the way, the answers come slow and sub-par compared to what happened before. He delivers a living story rooted in mundane superhero fantasies. The protagonist suffers a dilemma about his love life and his own sexuality when he finds himself involved in several horrific deaths. And in these deaths, such lizards always arise. Worried about it, he remembers when he read a magazine of a guy...

Michael Smith's boring life is going nowhere when characters from a comic book from his childhood start appearing in the real world...I've got about half of Peter Milligan's run on Shade in long boxes in the basement and Enigma has been on my radar for years so I snapped it up at a convention not long ago for the princely sum of five bucks.Enigma came out during Vertigo's early days so it has that WTF feel a lot of early Vertigo books have at first. On some level, Enigma is a deconstruction of t...

I'm not clear on why people are comparing this to Watchmen or Swamp Thing, other than it's a good story with great art that was pretty much different than the usual comic book dreck... in a good way.I had read this as monthly issues came out in 1995, amongst other stories coming out at the time. Reading it from month to month kind of filters the story and I don't remember ever reading the entire thing in a single sitting.That was rectified last evening as I sat down, pulled out all the issues an...