Enigma #5

The fifth chapter of Peter Milligan and Duncan Fegredo's unsettling Vertigo series arrives with a cover that pulls no punches: a red-haired figure in a striped shirt lies splayed and bloodied at the center of a chaotic tableau, surrounded by scattered money, a green lizard, a torn comic page bearing the words "Lizards and Ghosts," and a ring of eerie blue masks with expressions ranging from blank to anguished. Fegredo's cover art — colored beautifully by Sherilyn Van Valkenburgh — has an almost collage-like intensity, layering dread and strange imagery into something that feels genuinely disorienting in the best possible way. Five issues in, Enigma is clearly reveling in its own weird, mature darkness, and this installment looks like no exception.