Beauty & the Beast

The gay online anthology Young Bottoms in Love spawns yet another comic, this one reprinting the 10-page story Beauty & The Beast, with some new work by the same artist.

Gregory Lockard has written a contemporary, non-fantasy all-gay version of the famous fairytale once beautifully adapted into film by French director -and big fag- Jean Cocteau. This time, Beauty is a young man working in a bookshop alongside a large, bearded and slightly older man, who'll be his Beast. The story shows them getting together, after some opposition from another cruising guy full of himself (called "Hunter", of course), and a rather funny apparition from the Queer Eye on the Straight Guy team, which the writer uses to make some trenchant comments on a lot of gay people's idea of beauty and attractiveness.

Michael DiMotta illustrates the story with a professional-looking style halfway between realistic and cartoony, very expressive and with a body language we don't always see in better-known artists.
After that story, we find a collection of full-page drawings of a series called "The 7 Deadly Sins of contemporary America", where DiMotta points to some excess of modern society.

A very well realised first comic for the two authors, Beauty and the Beast makes us eager for more. Another proof of the richness of the YBIL anthology.