Being beautiful comes with a very deadly cost in Jeremy Haun, Jason Hurley and John Rauch’s “The Beauty”. Read on for our review of the series first collection but be warned, there are some mild spoilers.
Written by Jeremy Haun and Jason Hurley
Illustrated by Jeremy Haun and John Rauch
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Imagine a sexually transmitted disease that makes those infected better looking… a disease people want. That disease is real, and it’s called the Beauty.Two years after the Beauty burst onto the scene, over half of America is infected. Now, it looks like the downside may be far worse than anyone suspected. Detectives Vaughn and Foster find themselves on the front line of the battle against the Beauty, embroiled in a conspiracy they never knew existed.
Image publishes a whole lot of books each month and with heavy hitters like “Saga”, “The Walking Dead” and “Deadly Class”, it can be easy for things to fly under the radar. This is usually the case with Image books that aren’t headlined by names like Kirkman or Vaughan. “The Beauty” is a series that has flown right under the radar but is another quality series being put out by the publisher. “The Beauty” Volume 1 presents a horror story with a mirror right up to the reflection of modern society to great effect.
In “The Beauty” Volume 1, we are shown a world that isn’t so different from our own. Beauty and fame are still highly desired and people are still willing to do whatever to be perfect. About 2 years ago a new sexually transmitted disease started going around and it became something people actually wanted. This disease grants people beauty. They get perfect skin, perfect hair and perfect bodies so people are seeking it out on purpose for this reason. All is going fine until people start spontaneously combusting and now attention towards The Beauty as the cause.
“The Beauty” primarily functions as a police procedural but deals with a fairly horrific situation. Like the film It Follows, it uses sex in it’s cautionary tale about being careful. The danger is in the lack of safe sex, not the sex itself but regardless, it still instills fear because it’s so easy to spread. The concept plays with what society values and it really doesn’t require a leap of faith to accept how many people have caught this disease on purpose. The best horror gets into our deepest fears and Haun and Hurley really get into this by exploiting society’s beauty standards. They take real world insecurities and magnify them to great effect. We’re asked to look in ourselves about what makes someone beautiful and yes, it can be an uncomfortable thing to examine given social gender roles and unrealistic standards. “The Beauty” also pulls no punches. As Vaughn and Foster get deeper into things, there’s a bigger situation that gets revealed to them and that’s when “it” starts to hit the fan. With “The Beauty” you can expect the unexpected and it becomes a true page turning thriller in every sense.
The police procedural angle is a tough one to try but Hurley and Haun do a great job at making us care about Detectives Vaughn and Foster. Police procedurals can be very tropey and while those are here, it’s the concept that allows it to feel brand new. You still have clashing personalities, a bond that only partners can have and when they both end up facing what feels like an inevitable death from The Beauty, they bond even more. However, this team avoids going the Mulder/Scully route and keeps things actually platonic and it’s incredibly refreshing. Framing it as a police procedural also allows the reader to learn the ins and outs of what’s happening and it makes it much easier to get into.
Jeremy Haun’s art is, for the most part, very good. The first big challenge for Haun is differentiating regular, not infected people from those who are infected. This is my biggest problem with the art. Beauty is a tricky thing and for the most part, there’s enough to distinguish between the two. He features a lot of perfect anatomy, great body design and some strong facial features that you’d consider “perfect”. However, he does this almost too much and the not infected people are, at times, tough to tell apart. This isn’t the case throughout the entire issue as Vaughn and Foster are pretty distinguishable from their partners later in the book but it is something that could use some improvement in later issues.
There is however, some great graphic moments with the victims that really hit home the horror vibe the book wants to evoke. The brittle skin, the loss of all “humanity” in the victims visibly shows the cost of this disease and it is a complete contrast of what the disease does to people while they’re still living. There are some really great shootouts that capture the frantic energy of a situation like that. John Rauch’s colors have this dark hue all the way through the book and it works to set an almost totally crime noir tone. The dichotomy between the infected people and the not infected people is very well illustrated by the colors and it’s why my previous comment about the actual designs is a nitpick and not something that brings the book down all that much. Rauch gives those characters a little extra spark and it has a very good effect.
Final Verdict: 8.5 – “The Beauty” is a fresh mystery with a great concept and strong character development.
