The Garden of Enid: Adventures of a Weird Mormon Girl, Part Two / Scott Hales; foreword by Theric Jepson. Salt Lake City: Kofford Books, 2017. Paper. $22.95. ISBN: 978-1-58958-563-8

This is merely a note, not a full-blown review. If you know Enid, you know you want to read this book. Enid’s adventures continue from Part One: She faces hardship and heartbreak with courage, and in the last comic she is literally setting out on a quest as real as any mythic hero’s. It’s funny, it’s tender, it’s real, it’s oh-so-Mormon.

What I want to add to the several positive reviews hasn’t been mentioned yet, at least in what I have seen:

If Enid were a movie or a TV series, you’d expect the DVD to have extra features. Enid’s extras are all here on paper, in the backmatter after the comics:

In “Selected Notes and Commentary,” Scott Hales tells you what inspired individual comics, or what he wanted to convey in a given panel. He talks about Enid’s famous t-shirts – and I’m too giddy to refrain from noting that he identifies one of Enid’s shirts by referring to my “wonderful history blog.” It’s like watching a video with the director’s commentary turned on where you’re invited behind the scenes to see what happened off-camera to bring you a favorite scene or episode.

Katherine Morris interviewed Scott for a Mormon Artist Podcast about two years ago, and a transcription of that podcast is published here as “Tell It and Tell It Honestly.” If the director’s commentary was a fine sauce for your delicious feast, this interview is an additional full course. Scott talks about art and fiction, about the experience of drawing Enid, and why Mormons of all stripes seem to respond to Enid.

The extra material includes many pages of “outtakes” – like the shots of actors flubbing their lines, or scenes cut from a movie because they didn’t fit, Scott has his own set of comics that just didn’t work for one reason or another. In “The Compost Pile,” you’ll see never-before-published comics and read Scott’s explanations for what he was trying to do and why this or that comic simply fell flat. The section ends with one well-drawn comic that Scott says “still brings a smile to my face” – and you will discover why he chose to drop that comic from the main section of Part Two.

Next comes a hilarious selection of Mormon Halloween costumes, modeled by Enid. Some, you might feel like duplicating for your own costume; others are physically impossible in the real world, but you’ll laugh all the harder.

Enid grants her own interview in another feature, sharing her thoughts on Mormon literature. There is encouragement from Melissa Leilani Larson on taking control of our own Mormon stories. There’s even an Enid mask – with a Mormons-only caution about its appropriate use.

And there are two new comics related to the publication of these two volumes of Enid’s story. That Joseph Smith has a real sense of humor, doesn’t he?

And finally – or firstly – Scott sets the stage with an author’s introduction on Mormon storytelling, and Theric Jepson follows with a foreword setting out his view on why Enid succeeds so well in our day and culture.

If all those extras, on top of the main feature of the Enid comics themselves, don’t set your juices flowing, I don’t know what will.