He’s invincible in a fight, he can heal quickly from practically any injury, he’s working for the Heterodynes secretly at present while pretending to serve the Wulfenbachs, Mama Gika knows him but won’t talk about him, and Castle Heterodyne recognizes him. What else could he be?
No, he doesn’t look like a Jager, but, no two look alike, do they? The Jagerdraught mutates them each in a different way – some have horns, some look like reptiles, they come in all colors. It’s not implausible one might end up looking like an unmodified human. Or almost – what’s with those pointed ears?
In fact, he might be that mysterious hidden Jager General.
Personally, I think he’s the ur-Jäger, the very first person ever to receive the jägerdraught (probably a prototype version of it). But it’s also always possible that he’s another sort of thing entirely, perhaps the only one of his kind. And it’s even conceivable that he’s a “normal” human who’s Just That Badass.
Barring unknowns, such as Chronos suggests, my guess is that he’s the Jager General. While it would be cool if he were a Badass Normal, evidence suggests that he has substantially accelerated healing that would not have been possible under the circumstances for a factory-spec human. (Gil’s healing was similarly accelerated at Mama’s, but her comments on it suggested that he is not exactly standard issue, either.)
I thought he was one of the lost Heterodynes, working undercover because he was tired of having to save the world, and letting the Wulfenbachs do it their way.
If I recall correctly, Higgs was a character in the Girl Genius game. Which is noteworthy because the game was published six years before Higgs first appeared in the strip. This indicates that Higgs is a major character in the storyline that the Foglios had been planning for long in advance of his first appearance.
But does not say whether the “Bosun” title is found anywhere in the strip or is some kind of fanfic/fanwank embellishment. If the latter, shame on the Foglios for missing that boat!
Comic book logic: Prototypes are always better than final versions. Besides which, Jägers get more powerful with age (as Vore is about to remind Gil), so for Higgs to be the most powerful of the Jägers, he must be the oldest of them.
My theory on Gil is: When Lucrezia drugged Klaus to get him out of the way, she shipped him out of Europa entirely and he somehow wound up in Skifander. His mysterious wife is either the queen or a princess of Skifander – that’s why Gil is entitled to be addressed as “Your Highness.” The reason Klaus suspects that Zeetha might have been sent to kill Gil is that Skifandrian tradition requires all males born to the royal family be killed at birth, to preserve the matriarchy. (After all, we never hear anything of the warrior kings or princes of Skifander, do we? Only of warrior queens and princesses.) Which would make Gil and Zeetha siblings or half-siblings or cousins.
But, that would not account for Gil having any unusual healing ability. If he has, maybe he gets it from his father’s side – Klaus, whenever we see him with his shirt off, has so many stitch-scars that he looks like a novice spark’s construct; he must have healed from a lot of injuries.
I think it’s actually canon that Gil and Zeetha are siblings or half-siblings: IIRC, there’s Word of Author somewhere that “Chump” (as in, Zeetha, daughter of) was the name Klaus went by when he was in Skifander.
Perhaps, but when Mamma Gkika notes that the treatment device on Gil’s leg is already ready to remove, she says, “Hy guess hyu poppa gots more ov our secrets den he lets on.” That may suggest that his rapid healing is related to the jagers’ recuperative ability in some way, if only in that he responds well to battledraught, which is brewed for jagers. (I’m not suggesting that Gil is a jager, by the way, just that his father may have used his knowledge of jagers in some way that gave Gil some enhanced abilities.)
