2 out of 5

Bear with me, because I had ‘Face’ in my collection for a long, long time, and stood by it as one of Milligan’s better works.  It has a great central idea and flutters with Duncan Fegredo’s delicious pencils, at the point when he was still doing his sketchy bit but beyond the incredible looseness of the early Enigma issues.  Dotted through are various Milligan-isms, references to art or literature, flippant comments passed off as equally stupid and meaningful, and he uses the same disarming trick he did for Shade – opening with a very grisly scene that goes beyond what you may be expecting, even from a Vertigo book.

But time has passed, and I’ve read a lot more comics now.  Tossing in nods to classic media isn’t quite as OMG as it was previously, and I’ve seen Milligan better, and I’ve seen him worse.  ‘Face’ is far from his worst, but it may garner a lower rating from me.  Why?  Well, where his X-Men soap opera might just be a poor attempt at finding an angle on teen drama, ‘Face’ goes for conceptual… and fails.  A lot of Pete’s stuff from this era follows this trend, which is funny because it was when he was at his most prolific, and perhaps most creative.  But our pretty poet and philosopher, when trying to tune the surrealism of his early British work (or the more straight-forward – thematically – stuff like Bad Company) into something meaningful, forces it.  Idea comes first, then the story gets built around it.  ‘Face’ – about plastic surgeon David tasked with turning an exiled writer’s face into a work of art – aims for an unnerving undercurrent, but it’s cache of unlikeable characters and sloppy detail painting (another Milligan trait – making a character sketch and then unable to leave all the bits he loves on the cutting room floor, so tossing them randomly in via one-panel observations out of nowhere) muddle our ability to feel any of that anxiety, plus the starting point – plastic surgery and superficiality and some pretty obvious American Psycho comparisons – takes too long to get to its more inventive core storyline.  And a late twist is shoved in a bit hurriedly to get to a further questionable conclusion that, yes, goes with the concept but narratively feels short-sighted.

I can see Pete as bursting with ideas at this time and feeling like his pen could do no wrong, letting the things that fascinate him percolate to the page not fully formed, trusting that as the pages go on he’ll find his way.  ‘Face’ isn’t exactly overly ambitious, but the tense psychological thriller it wants to be needs more than a one-shot to find its footing.  I’m probably being harsh at 2 out of 5, but I flipped the pages not really entertained, more… I dunno, wishing that different aspects of Pete from different eras had gotten their hands on the story, because it has a lot of potential.  This is also not an endorsement to not read it – I think it’s a cool book, especially if you haven’t read much Milligan, or any horror-esque titles.  But once you know the beats of either, what’s lacking is more apparent, and thus the read more disappointing.