Image Comics 2015
Written by Jeremy Haun & Jason A. Hurley
Illustrated by Stephen Green
Coloured by John Rauch
Lettered & Designed by Fonografiks
Well here we are with the end of the second arc and wow. If Jeremy isn’t going to be doing the interiors my vote is for Stephen to keep doing them this is the best they’ve looked this entire arc! Well when we left off Vincent’s people killed Lucca and Parks and Ezerea looked like she was going to be as well when she attacked the attackers. We open this issue and see just what happened between then and now.
Timo came and found Ezerea and brought her to a hospital. Turns out Timo found himself a bit of Beauty as well and well yeah he’s as handsome as any classic movie star should be. Ezerea is a wanted woman and Vincent’s men found her so it’s time for Timo to take on the move to a safe hideout where she can fully recover. It turns out the sideeffects of Beauty is that you heal faster and since Timo got to her in time she was able to get better a lot faster than a normal person.
All Ezerea wanted was to love Lucca and have a life with him and it looked like that was finally going to happen. Till Vincent sent out a hit team to take out him, Parks and her. Now with Timo by her side the name of the game is revenge and trust there’s nothing quite like a woman scorned.
I love the work Stephen’s doing on the interiors here. Ezerea looks gorgeous and thanks to the Beauty you’d never have known she was a man at one point. She and Timo make a handsome couple, who knows what the possibilities there are now, and while they may not be blowing up like we saw folks do in the first arc it’s clear what some of the benefits are. I like the page layouts here with the use of angles, perspective and backgrounds they all work together nicely to create the bigger picture. You get that sense of where they are at all times and it makes the scenes so much fuller to see the backgrounds used this way.
I like that this issue concludes the arc while simultaneously leaves things open for further tales. It’s like everything we’ve seen so far is just a precursor for what’s to come for these characters. Though should they meet our intrepid cops and both sides of the same coin finally come together i’m not gonna be mad. In the meantime I’ve come to really like Ezerea and the kind of woman she is. The boys have really done this great job on making her seem so real with a many layered personality.
I have no idea who we’ll meet with the third arc of the series but if the boys keep writing like this we’re going to have way too many characters we want to continually see more of. While this is a whole different point of view on Beauty and the effect it has on their lives it will be nice to see some of the science and conspiracy theory around it again so here’s hoping. Regardless Beauty is a creature all it’s own and wherever it goes i’m gonna follow that’s for sure.