text: HURLEY: Kara Vaughn is an exceptionally good detective who puts all of herself into her work, and also happens to be afflicted with The Beauty. She doesn't have much of a social life beyond the office, but she's close enough to her partner that she considers him family. Drew Foster, on the other hand, is more dedicated to his wife than to the job. That doesn't mean he doesn't love his work, and it definitely doesn't mean he isn't good at it; he just realizes that his marriage is the most important thing in his world. He and Kara have worked together for quite a while, and they really click. They're not just partners, they're also best friends.
  IC: Jeremy and Jason, you're co-writing, while Jeremy is also drawing, with John Rauch handling colors. How did this team come to be? Did you have prior experience together?
  HAUN: Hurley and I've known each other forever. We're good friends. We came up in comics together...just on different sides of things. For years, I've worked drawing comics and he's worked comics retail. During that time we've done what creative friends do—sit around and talk about stories.
  THE BEAUTY started out on a car ride, coming back from a little show in St. Louis. I ran the general idea by Hurley. "What if there was an STD that could make you beautiful? Would you get it? What if there was a hidden bad side?" Four hours later we had the first arc and overall theme of the series worked out. It was a thing we had to do together.
  HURLEY: Like Jeremy said, we've been friends for years. I was around when he started getting his first work published, and he was one of the first customers when I opened my own comic shop. We've always thrown ideas back and forth, and we worked together once on a short story for an old Troma Films anthology.
  During that trip home from St. Louis, we discussed a few different concepts that we each had, but we kept coming back around to the idea of The Beauty. We talked about all of the different story possibilities that could happen within that world, and eventually landed on one that we felt was a really solid introduction to the concept.
  HAUN: Once we had the book up and running, we brought on John Rauch to do color art and Stephen Finch from Fonografiks to do lettering and design on the book.
  I'd worked with Rauch for a few years. He's easily one of the best colorists in the business. Not every penciller/inker works perfectly with every colorist. John gets my work and makes it look damned good.
  Steven is a design mastermind. We had a conversation early on and discussed that we'd like the book to feel like a fashion magazine. He ran with that and came up with something truly stunning. He does that every single issue.
  IC: A comic like this cleanly divides those with The Beauty from those without it. As creators, how do you see the two groups, in terms of their emotional states? Is there common ground amongst those infected with The Beauty, past their attractiveness?
  HURLEY: I'm sure it's easy for people without The Beauty to think that everyone with it is some sort of egotistical, dangerously vain, sycophant. It's probably just as easy for everyone that has The Beauty to look at everyone without it as a prude who doesn't care enough about their appearance to take the easiest step possible toward self-improvement.
  One of the biggest flaws with the human condition is our ability to divide ourselves, and each other, into groups based on nothing beyond appearance. However, not everyone with The Beauty caught it on purpose, and not everyone without it is intentionally avoiding it. We wanted to tackle issues relating to vanity and societal pressure to be "attractive" within the story, of course, the divide between Beauties and Non-Beauties works just as well as an allegory for any socially constructed group definitions we have in the world today though.
  IC: When drawing those with The Beauty, what do you focus on, or make sure they have to signify their attractiveness?
  HAUN: It's tricky. I tend to like drawing weird-looking people. I can draw ugly all day long. Drawing "beautiful" people is kind of a pain in the ass. When we started developing the book we had a lot of conversations about what the Beauties were going to look like. We, as a society, have this weird view of what is beautiful. Since a big part of this book is social commentary, it really came down to Beauties being "Hollywood Hot."
  Over the course of the first arc, I think I spent more time fretting over how characters looked than any other project I've drawn. I worried over Beauties being symmetrical enough. I worried over people without the Beauty looking too attractive. I worried over having other people being TOO weird-looking.
  HURLEY: This is where John Rauch shines. His colors, the muted palette for the world at large, and the saturation and "glow" of the Beauties, really helped to define the visual language of the book.
  IC: THE BEAUTY works in greedy pharmaceutical companies, government conspiracies, and a look at our social mores—in short, a whole bunch of very modern anxieties. Can you tell us a little about where the idea for THE BEAUTY first came from, and how it evolved as it went from idea to pitch to finished product?
  HAUN: We're obsessed with outward beauty. It's...a bit of a problem. We're bombarded day-in and day-out with commercials, magazines, and general entertainment telling us that we should look a certain way. We see all of that are willing to do anything to be beautiful—perfect. People are going on crash diets, doing extreme fad exercise plans, and getting elective surgeries right and left.
  I looked at all of that and wanted to examine exactly how far we'd go to look beautiful. Would we be willing to catch a disease? In a lot of cases, I think the answer would be yes.
  HURLEY: We originally conceived the story as a much slower burn than we ended up with. Some of the reveals and twists were compressed down to grab people's attention as fast as possible, and give us the killer cliffhanger we have at the end of issue one.
  IC: The fashion covers were striking, and seemed to be a hit with...everyone, basically. Break down those covers for me—how do they tie into the themes of the series? why did you choose those specific images? Is there one you're especially proud of?
  HAUN: We wanted to do something different for the covers. Something that would jump off the shelves. I did dozens of designs, messing around with themes and various looks. Nothing seemed to click.
  Somewhere along the way, I drew this quick sketch on a scrap piece of paper—a Beauty standing there, like she'd died right in the middle of a high fashion photo shoot. Suddenly we had it. From there we made this list of things we wanted to do—this one needed to have a Vanity Fair cover feel, this one should feel like an ad for a Hugo Boss suit, this one should be a bridal gown cover...come to think of it, we still haven't done the bridal gown cover. Guess that'll be the third arc.
  One of my favorite covers was the cover to issue two. Lingerie ad made it onto the list. I pitched that if we were doing an underwear ad, it should be a dude in his underwear. Hurley responded with "HELL. YES." There are always covers featuring ladies in their underwear. Turnabout is fair play. As you'd expect, we got a bit of a mixed response to the cover. I'm fine with that, though.
  HURLEY: My personal favorite from the first arc is the cover to issue five. It's one I had absolutely no input on. Jeremy literally came home from a vacation and said, "Hey, I drew this cover while I was gone. What do you think?", and it was friggin' awesome.
  HAUN: Yeah. I love that one too. I'm not even sure where it came from. I had an idea for a jewelry ad piece, but then while I was on vacation on the Oregon coast I had the idea for a necklace made of skulls. I think it might be the fastest turn-around on any of the covers. It went from concept to finished inks in just a few hours.
  
  The following is a transcript of the speech given by Eric Stephenson, Publisher at Image Comics, on Friday, February 19th at 3:10 p.m. at the 10th Annual ComicsPRO Membership Meeting in Portland, Oregon to the comics retailer community.
  I'd like to talk about the future, but first, we're going to do some time travel, back to a time when there was no Internet, no Twitter, no Facebook, no Instagram. A time when there were no comic book stores.
  No one here was in this business in the 1950s, but by all accounts, it was a bleak time for comics. Our industry was barely two decades old, yet it was on the brink of collapse.
  Political posturing had rendered one of comics' most vital creative forces – EC Comics – all but mute. Crime and horror comics had been neutered by the Comics Code and for all intents and purposes were dead – shot by their own gun. Comics bowed to outside pressure and erected a self-regulating ratings system that all but outlawed any type of content that might appeal to older readers. Comics were for kids, after all, but even superheroes, so popular during the Second World War, were a faltering concern.
  Martin Goodman's comic book imprint, then known as Atlas, was making due selling monster comics, but by the early '60s, things were looking grim. You have to look into the darkness to see the light, though, and it was in those dark times that comics found renewed hope.
  Maybe something was in the air back then, because the same time that gave us The Beatles and Bob Dylan gave us what we now know as the Marvel Universe.
  Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko, and all the amazing artists that worked alongside them inspired a generation of readers with their work and in doing so, turned Marvel Comics into a towering monolith amid a teetering industry. DC Comics, already well-known for Superman, Batman, and the Justice League was reinvigorated as well, and without much exaggeration, it can be said that superheroes saved comics.
  Comics boomed for a decade, but as the ‘60s receded into memory, so too did the excitement that had grown around comics. Jack Kirby left Marvel for DC. Superheroes began to struggle against the constraints of the Comics Code. Underground comics and black and white magazines like National Lampoon and Warren’s Creepy, Eerie, and Vampirella highlighted the restlessness of a medium eager to grow.
  But the newsstands that had long served as comics’ primary sales outlet began their long goodbye, with inexpensively priced comic books first to go as every and all attempt was made to increase profits whilst consolidating space.
  Writers and artists entering the industry then were routinely assured the business was on its last legs. Comics were doomed.
  All comics were returnable then, and returned they were, in droves. Often, comics didn’t even make it out of the warehouse, resulting in regional scarcity that heightened the value of comics on the growing collector’s market.
  In the interest of time, I’m going to gloss over some facts here, but it was at that point Phil Seuling began laying the foundation for the Direct Market.
  It didn’t happen overnight. It took years for small used bookstores and head shops to gradually evolve into bonafide comic book stores, but by the end of the ‘70s, there was a system in place and the market as we know it today was in its infancy.
  We got Love & Rockets, American Flagg, and Nexus. First Comics. Pacific Comics. Eclipse. Kitchen Sink. That old master, Will Eisner, unleashed a steady stream of graphic novels that challenged the perception of what comics could and should be, and from the late ‘70s through the 1980s and beyond, comics exploded with creativity.
  Thanks to the talents of Alan Moore, Frank Miller, Art Spiegelman, Garth Ennis, the Hernandez Brothers, and Neil Gaiman, the world was starting to pay attention. Comics weren't just kids stuff.
  But there were problems, too. Black and white indie comics boomed – then crashed – and in doing so, underscored a penchant for short-sighted greed that has ebbed and flowed in our marketplace for decades.
  Just as it seemed that comics were bound for the kind of cultural legitimacy that eluded the art form when mature content was foolishly abandoned with the sudden death of EC Comics in the ‘50s, the market gave in to its most craven impulses. The unprecedented level of creativity that ushered in one of comics' most prosperous periods gave way to gimmicks.
  Variant covers. Foil covers. Hologram covers. Embossed covers. Die-cut covers. Gatefold covers. Glow in the dark covers.
  Comics were polybagged, comics were commoditized, and comics were hoarded as speculation ran rampant.
  Comics were shipped late, and sometimes not at all, as publishers of all breeds galloped ever onward, with little regard for their readers and next to no respect for retailers.
  Heroes died, and heroes were reborn. Titles were canceled, and titles were relaunched and renumbered.
  A textbook example of both short-term thinking and extreme hubris resulted in an almost lethal blow to the Direct Market’s distribution system, effectively leaving only Diamond Comics Distributors standing.