Enigma #7

Penultimate chapter of DC/Vertigo's unsettling eight-part series, this September 1993 issue — subtitled "Sex in Arizona" — showcases a cover by Duncan Fegredo that layers two distinct visual registers: a painted, purple-drenched figure with long dark hair reaches upward amid writhing tentacle-like forms, while a stark black-and-white inset portrait of a wide-eyed young man stares out against a warm Arizona sunset. Sherilyn Van Valkenburgh's coloring gives the painted figure an otherworldly luminescence that contrasts beautifully with the flat graphic simplicity of the inset, and a pale alien face cradled nearby adds one more layer of strangeness to the composition. With Peter Milligan's writing and Fegredo's art, Enigma remains one of the more thoughtfully surreal corners of the early Vertigo line.