The XX Factor: It Was Beauty
Who Killed the Beast

Part One: Why We Can’t Have Nice Things (Like Perfection)

Image Comics released its first arc of the new series The Beauty in 2015 and is well into its second arc at the moment in 2016, and just like many other Jonny-come-lately moments I experience as a middle-aged woman in the Twitter and Snapchat universe, I became acquainted with a good story and better concept well after the local comic book store discussed it. On a ladies night, no less. But such is the typical day of a target demographic who decides a cutting-edge product or series becomes mainstream. We white academic aged 35+ women have a tendency to be right behind the curve bumping something cool up to mainstream status with numbers and access to just enough disposable income. We buy useless shit instead of useless real estate that old white men waste money on. We have Botox parties, too. Botox parties, wine with paint-by- numbers nights, and designer puppies. We can be really goofy and evil as an
economic force.

Which is why The Beauty is a reflection of this goofiness. We pay people to inject botulism in our faces, cut us open and stuff silicone as bubbles of faux subcutaneous fat stores, and even go so far as to pay someone to slice off labia to appear younger and more virginal in bed with genital cosmetic surgery. And then we privileged Real Housewives will collectively gasp at Female Genital Mutilation in communities where brown skin and abject poverty reigns supreme.

The Beauty takes this goofiness to a whole other pandemic level.

Imagine a world where a sexually transmitted disease causes one to become conventionally beautiful. Who would be the ones to popularize it? Who would profit from it? And who would be sure any hazards to human health would be glossed over or denied altogether for the sake of perpetuating this corporate brand of insanity?

Don’t think too hard, now. Just go visit your local Panera and look around.

What The Beauty does is challenge us to realize our bodily ethics, body shaming practices, and body phobias as an economic model with a twist. Cosmetic surgery is so last millennium. Let’s make infections sexy. Thanks to research and development, STI’ s suffer most from stigmas. We need something deadly again, and The Beauty captures ALL of these elements.

 

Part Two: If You Got the Money, Honey, We Got Your Disease

What I’ve come to appreciate about The Beauty, now nearly finished with its second arc, is it’s ability to begin with the central storyline around two figures coming to terms with their own contraction of the disease. Vaughn and Foster, both investigators in law enforcement, discover a corpse that had just combusted internally on the subway that was a confirmed infected case. The story opens two years after the virus was introduced (whetherintentionally or mutated naturally, that hasn’t been discussed yet) into the human population. Half….HALF…of the population has contracted it, with the culture responding to the new reality in various but predictable ways: religious sexual repression, DHS and the CDC investigative operations treating this like a First Child How-Do-We-Adult-This, Congress reps entertaining suspect lobby interests, Dark Web wanna-be’s wondering how to survive while seeking cures/antidotes/profits in an-as-yet unregulated market, and of course cops. Detectives-are-us characters who we hope can get some answers for an obsessive mob of citizens.

Vaughn and Foster eventually discover that this virus is not just a fad, but is deadly as in Ebola-deadly. But with a fireworks display as patients combust and their entire internal organ systems flare up suddenly. They discover it’s deadly, and that there has been a cover-up by people in power both above and below acting in collusion to keep a population under control. We can’t let half the population who has the virus know they’ re gonna turn into volcanos. That would hurt ratings and profit margins and recruiting efforts. People are loving their abs right now. Well, that or the non-patients despise patients because of an extreme form of meritocracy bearing down on cultural beauty standards. You didn’t earn that, you weren’t born with that, you stole that, you’re a fake beautiful person. The divide that already exists between the beautiful shiny people and the 6’s deepen greatly in the comic.

Here’s what’s seriously amazing about this story that I’m salivating over. It’s a disease. Diseases. Don’t. Discriminate. All people, regardless of gender, race, class, orientation, and gender identity are one sexual encounter away from perfection. Something that was once regarded as safely kept for royalty, the rich, or with genetic luck of the draw, half the population blazed through that paradigm and forced society it’s hand. Beautiful people succeed more in money, love, and status according to beauty standards de jure. Well, the floodgates have opened. Now what?

The Beauty is attempting to answer that question.

Part 3: Mirror, Mirror, On the Wall. Tell Me Something I Want to Hear.

Several instances throughout have characters looking themselves in the mirror, offering their bodies for sale, and acting as spokespeople for a side – whether as infected or non-infected. It all whittles down to this question: what is your price?

These dilemmas are a favorite of mine as thematic devices for a story. I often times
wonder what our price is for selling out our standards for a type of security, quality of
life, feeling of acceptance in the majority tribe (so to speak). Money speaks. Sex sells
it. And here, disease insures. When we reflect – like the characters reflect – the internal
bargaining and justification begins. For Vaughn and Foster, as well as Timo and eventually Ezerae in the second arc, the downward spiral and upward spiral intersect between social mobility and ruin. All because they found themselves perfected into beautiful people.

Coming soon, Vaughn (who took the experimental antidote), Foster (who began the
Anti-Beauty pandemic a-la Twelve Monkeys style), Timo (escaping hitman identity), and Ezerae (trans woman escaping assassin identity AND male identity) are all facing this
unchartered territory of stealing beauty from the economy. They all are finding impacts
of an unregulated STI reality on themselves and their loved ones. And they all are discovering the price they are willing to pay for feeling a sense of control in an out-of-control pandemic.

Rating: 3 out of 4 stars because it’s still ongoing and too new for me to say 4 stars
Alcohol consumed: ¾ bottle of good cheap moscato
Check it out: https://imagecomics.com/comics/releases/the-beauty-1