Aug
12
2015
0

The Beauty #1 Review

Written by: Jeremy Haun and Jason A. Hurley

Art by: Jason A. Hurley

Published by: Image

The Beauty was the winner of Top Cow’s Pilot Season contest way back in 2011. The contest had fans vote for which one shot comic they’d like to see continued as a main series. The comic about a world in which an STD turns people beautiful, has now finally been turned into a full series and is being published by Image, who have republished the original issue with a few aesthetic changes. The series has a great hook that’s easy to explain, and while the story itself doesn’t do much to break the mold of detective dramas, still manages to be a solid (re)debut that is easy to recommend.

The story’s main hook is pretty great and is sure to intrigue many people to give it a read. There’s a lot more depth to the idea that just the initial hok, as things such as anti-beauty cells have taken hold, and all of this is explained very well by the book through dialgoue. There is a quick monolgue introduction at the start of the book that isn’t too heavy handed, and outside of this all the world building is done naturally through dialgoue. It’s pretty refreshing to see that exposition can be done without being tedious, as the comic is perfectly paced, revealing crucial bits of information just enough to keep you intrigued to read more without feeling like you’re sitting through an information dump. These pieces of information also tie into the books central mystery, a young woman afflicted by the beauty disease who spontaneously combusted, with the disease being the only obvious cause. It’s a good angle to generate drama and a good story outside of the initial concept, however as well written as the mystery is, it feels a little too comfortably attuned to the usual CSI drama formula without doing anything too groundbreaking. This isn’t a bad thing by any means, the drama is still intriguing and I was having fun while reading it, enjoying the dynamic between our two leads and following along nicely with the story, though if you’re a big fan of this genre you probably won’t find too much new here. A shame given how creative the central hook is. The only other thing I feel is worth mentioning is the last page twist; while it’s certainly unnexpected, yet makes perfect sense for the story and gives it a good driving force, it throws of what I was enjouuing about the dynamic of the two leads so I’m not exactly sure how to feel about it. That said, there’s plenty going on in the main story to interest you and I’d come back for another issue to read more.

Much of this criticism can be applied to the art too, as while it looks pretty great most of the time with slick character models and a nice layout, there isn’t too much that made me stop and say wow. Again, the art certainly isn’t bad, far from it, it looks really well done and Hurley is without a doubt a profressional. My main problem was that there doesn’t seem to be too much emotion coming from any of the characters. They all look great (even the ones without beauty) and display some good body language from pannel to pannel, but they’re hard to read emotion from. It’s made even worse as quite often there’s the odd choice to hide the eyes in shadow, making the characters even harder to read. I would like to stress however that while I may seem overly critical, the art does look great and fits the tone of the book well, it’s just frustraingly stiff at times which is not really my personal taste, but most people shouldn’t have a problem and will agree with the fact that this is a damn good looking book.

Overall, The Beauty is a solid start to a series that has tonnes of potential. Fans of the original should be more than pleased to see the book back again, and certainly newcomers should find a lot to like in this book. While I wish this debut had pushed itself a little further to match the creaitivity of its high concept hook, this is still a solid, good quality book that is easy to recommened and should mark the start of a really good series.