Beauty and the Beast: The Beast's Tale - Mallory Reaves

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Author: Mallory Reaves

Illustrator: Studio Dice, Gianluca Papi
Genre: Manga, Retelling.
Rating: 3.75 stars.

This is better than Belle’s version but it is still not as satisfying as I had expected.

The story is based on Disney’s 2017 live action movie of “Beauty and the Beast”. While the story is faithful to the movie, it doesn’t include all the scenes but covers the events that happen from Beast’s perspective. This lends the story a novelty that was missing in the other book that contains Belle’s version of events. After all, hers is the more popular narration so to see things through Beast’s eyes made a big difference. The story tries its best to help us understand Beast’s decisions. I loved Beast’s internal monologues in this book.

This book is part of a two-volume manga series which was originally released in 2017, just after the movie. This edition is the full colour version of the original B&W manga. While Belle’s book was full of bright and pastel-y colours, this one has more sombre and duller colour tones to match Beast’s “beastly” mood.

The illustrations are very nice, aptly manga in style. The manga order in this book is better than in Belle’s version but it is still not consistent throughout the story. Most of the pages follow the Western comic style of left-to-right panels, with only a few pages coming in the manga order of right-to-left. Either would have been fine, but having both isn’t good as it muddles things up.

Once again, there are jumps in the storyline, which I now realise were covered in Belle’s story. So the two books are like halves of each other but not exact semi-circular halves. Rather, they are more like two pieces with jagged edges but which fit into each other perfectly. This will create a problem if a reader chooses to go for one of the books and not the other. To get a complete experience, reading both the stories is a must. Perhaps, it would have been better to have the complete story in a single book than these two separate editions with partial narrations. (Then again, watching the movie too will provide the complete story.)

Basically, I enjoyed this graphic novel far better than Belle’s story, but it still left me wanting more.

My thanks to TOKYOPOP and NetGalley for the DRC of “Disney Manga: Beauty and the Beast – The Beast's Tale (Full-Color Edition)”. This review is voluntary and contains my honest opinion about the book.

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