1 out of 5

As a still recent convert to 2000 AD / JD, I appreciate the added value of the floppies packed with the Meg that highlight odds and ends from the mag’s past that probably aren’t well-regarded or long enough to merit reprints as trades.  But of course, that doesn’t guarantee it’s all good, and one must wonder if Faces was only necessitated as it was a sequel to the superior Freaks, reprinted in last month’s floppy.

Freaks wasn’t great, but it was an acceptable slice of old-school Milligan.  Artist John Higgins I guess wanted to revisit three-eyed alien Kilquo and her human boyfriend Carl, and does so with co-scripter Mindy Newell.  It’s however many years later, and Kilquo is a semi-star, appearing on talk shows and as an alien in sci-fi flicks, and Carl… Carl is a drunk.  While the shift is a little weird, as Milligan’s Carl wasn’t the greatest but he also wasn’t necessarily the slob Higgins and Newell paint him as, the beginning of our followup actually feels a bit more energized and funny than Pete’s original take.  Higgins art feels looser and more comedic than usual, and when Kilquo is recruited by Her Majesty to work as a shape-shifting assassin, it seems like we’re going to have another acceptable slice of something.  But – whatever Newell’s contributions were aside – it becomes clear that Higgins’ main profession ain’t as a writer, with our plotting jumping straight for a garbage heap cluttered with attempted twists with clones and alien invasions.  Character motivations are inconsistent from panel to panel and the art seems to follow the “let’s get this done” mentality that takes over the rest of the strip, pages just covering the basics.

The extra pages left over are filled up with some Higgins drawn Future Shocks starring Joe Black, agent for PEST, an Earth organization that combs other planets for resources.  These are bottom-of-the-barrel Shocks, as generic as their character’s name.

So it’s appreciated to have the whole Freaks saga lain before us, but whatever the genesis of deciding to followup Milligan’s original, it hardly seemed to go beyond the “what if…?” stage of plotting, falling apart as soon as that set-up is established.