After finishing the first double-sized issue of Beautiful Creatures, a new two-part miniseries to be released by Red 5 Comics this September, the book struck me as a hybrid of the 1995 comedy Clueless and Ridley Scott’s 1985 epic Legend. However, there’s one striking difference between those two movie titles and the comic book in question: I liked the movies but couldn’t stomach the book.
Beautiful Creatures opens with a young man taking a nose dive off of the Eiffel Tower as his mind floods with flashbacks of a mythological phoenix perched amidst a medieval setting. As the youth rockets towards the ground he bursts into flames, finally crashing into the pavement below as a smoking corporeal heap. Now jump to England in the year 2012 (end-of-the-world predictions, anyone?) where an irritating foursome of college girlfriends are found knocking back shots and splashing around in a Jacuzzi. Apparently they’ve only know each other for a week, but that didn’t stop them from becoming fast friends united by a love for ruckus. The roster is as follows: Kendra, a Canadian who is slighted when mistaken for a United States citizen; Rana, an Iraqi who is used as nothing more than an ethnic knickknack; Mohini, a British chick with an attitude; and Amelie, a French gal sporting a parodied accent that’s irritating to read.
At the end of their celebratory evening that mimicked a scene straight out of Girls Gone Wild without any kinky payoff, the ladies camp out in the living room of Amelie’s lavish home. First they all share a dream of the same young man from the beginning of the story as he falls through the sky while engulfed in flames. Then they’re all woken up and attacked by vicious gnomes donning blood-soaked hats. Then the girls’ discover the name of the fiery man (Eric) and that his body is being held hostage by a magic tree trying to devour him. Then they all venture to rescue him, where the end of the first issue is finished off with a canned cliffhanger. Oh, and before I forget, the young women discover along the way that they each have superpowers. No explanation of what the powers exactly are or where they came from is offered. They just have them.
Beautiful Creatures is a book I jumped into with the greatest of expectations. Red 5 Comics’ Neozoic was great fun that I raved about when the trade was released, and We Kill Monsters was a charming read that I enjoyed for its humanity. So needless to say, I was left disappointed with myself over my utter disappointment with Beautiful Creatures. It’s not hard for me to fall for a fantasy story, but there’s nothing magical here. The story was lobbed at me; it was rushed and lacked any kind of a paced clarity to explain what exactly was going on, and more importantly, why I should care. There were just too many plot elements hovering over the story with no anchor to give any of them a fulfilling narrative semblance.
Writer Kurtis Wiebe wants to do too much in too small a space while ignoring key factors like characters and setting. Aside from the somewhat appealing Kendra, the other women resemble Barbie dolls decorated as shallow multicultural props. And the rending voice breaks in the script slapped me across the face time and again, which occur from the onset. Consider these lines from the beginning scene: “There’s a secret inside of me fighting tooth and nail to get out, and as these flames burst out of me I realize I’m not my father’s son—also, being on fire sucks.” That’s a tacky one-liner if I’ve ever seen one, and it immediately tore me out of the serious atmosphere that Wiebe just finished establishing.
The release of Beautiful Creatures is being marketed as an action/comedy story reminiscent of the Harry Potter series and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I hate to say it, but the comic hits neither of those checkpoints. The only thing funny about the comic is how bad Amelie’s trite French accent comes off, and the story is so confusing and shallow that it doesn’t come close to matching the creative prowess of either Joss Whedon or J.K. Rowling.
After I finished the book once, I reread it in the hopes of finding a sole redeemable trait buried somewhere in its dizzying pages. But I didn’t. All that I gained was the certainty that Beautiful Creatures is a rushed and muddled story with uneventful characters all mixed together in a disappointing hodgepodge. There’s the possibility that I’m being overly harsh, as I’ve only seen the first issue of the two-part series. But oddly enough, I think the comic book itself settled my fragment of self-doubt. Towards the middle of the story, Kendra has a conversation with Eric where he explains his predicament. “That doesn’t make any sense,” Kendra says to Eric. She was right—his explanation didn’t make any sense, and neither did the rest of the comic.
This comic book review originally appeared on Comic News on 05 August 2009.
