Everything to Know About the Comics Behind Ryan Murphy’s Wild New Series The Beauty

If you had the chance to be beautiful, would you take it? We’re not talking about mere attractiveness, but a near-immediate physical metamorphosis into a perfect human specimen. Sounds tempting, but of course there’s a catch. That’s the premise of Ryan Murphy’s new FX show, The Beauty, co-created and co-written by Matt Hodgson. In the show, The Beauty is an STI that transforms a person into someone physically perfect, but with deadly consequences. Except nobody who has The Beauty knows that.

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It’s almost impossible not to draw comparisons to The Substance, the 2024 horror movie that became a breakaway box-office smash and multi-Oscar nominee. It also spawned countless reactions (positive and negative) about its depictions of what a woman (played by Demi Moore) will do in the pursuit of a younger, more beautiful version of herself. The Beauty gleefully leans into these comparisons with Coralie Fargeat’s film, even casting Demi Moore’s ex-husband, Ashton Kutcher, in a key role. 

But The Beauty is not a rip-off of The Substance. It’s actually based on a comic book of the same name by Image Comics, which ran from 2015-2021. Here’s what to know about the source material for the new series, which has drawn solid reviews since its three-episode premiere.

What happens in “The Beauty” comics?

At the start of the comics, created by Jeremy Haun and Jason A. Hurley, two years have elapsed since The Beauty took over the world. It’s a rampant and sought after sexually transmitted disease, capable of transforming those infected with it into someone conventionally, well, beautiful. As the comic describes, changes to people with The Beauty include “fat melted away, thinning hair returned, skin blemishes faded, and their facial features slimmed.” Unlike other diseases, people covet The Beauty. It’s believed that half the world has the disease, including around 200 million Americans. 

The Beauty has caused enormous division between those who have it and those who don’t. For some, it’s the ultimate status symbol; for others, a complete and utter betrayal of humankind. Activist groups that are both pro- and anti-Beauty have emerged, with hate crimes, homicides, and bombings on the rise as divisions deepen. 

The disease doesn’t make a person impossibly attractive, as evidenced by one man who’s struggling to get a date. Because he is exceedingly naturally attractive, everyone he encounters wants to sleep with him, assuming he has The Beauty, but he doesn’t—he’s just a very handsome man. In Murphy’s show, it transforms you into a completely different person physically. And while there are people who do actively try to get infected with The Beauty, there are plenty more who wake up the next morning transformed, unaware that they had slept with someone who has it. 

How does the show differ from the source material?

The disease itself manifests differently in the television series. In both versions, getting the disease puts the person under extreme physical duress as they suffer a high fever. In the comic, people fall asleep and wake up transformed, but the TV version is much more intense. There, they go through frightening body contortions and secrete a sort of goo. They wind up in what can be best described as a mucus cocoon, before emerging as an entirely different—and more beautiful—person. In the show, people come out as a whole new actor (a clever move that ups the stakes on television), but in the comics, they are just a more attractive version of themselves.  

Similar to the show, the comic features a pair of detectives trying to connect the dots behind a strain of explosive deaths, and everyone who’s spontaneously combusted has The Beauty. Soon, it becomes clear that just about everyone who has The Beauty will die roughly two years after they get infected. The detectives discover a possible cure, but a ruthless masked enforcer, Mr. Calaveras, is out to stop them—no matter how many people he has to kill. He’s protecting the shadowy interests who created the disease and helped it go global, and a cure risks bringing their contributions to light.

After a violent clash, Mr. Calaveras is defeated, and those still alive begin to disseminate the cure to The Beauty across the world. In the final issue, published in 2021, The Beauty has been eradicated. Those who remain are left to process their new selves (the cure allows people to survive, but can leave them with severe scarring all over their bodies) while considering the cost of their pursuit of beauty. 

What happens in the first three episodes of The Beauty?

While the comics start with the disease in full swing and known worldwide, The Beauty is very much under wraps at the beginning of the show. The first episode opens with a model (Bella Hadid) wreaking havoc on the streets of Paris before she shockingly combusts. Two FBI agents, Cooper Madsen (Evan Peters) and Jordan Bennett (Rebecca Hall), are sent to investigate and uncover a string of models dying in a similar fashion across Europe. 

They discover that before these models died, they underwent extraordinary physical changes, and none of them are recognizable compared to photos taken a few years prior. That’s because they have The Beauty, a disease transmitted through sex, as in the comics, that turns you into a new, incredibly attractive person. 

The first episode largely focuses on the male perspective through the eyes of the angry, lonely, and depressed Jeremy (Jaquel Spivey). An incel, Jeremy is desperate for change and sick of feeling that he’s repulsive to women. On an online message board, he finds out about a plastic surgeon. But that surgery goes poorly, and he’s still unable to attract women. A furious Jeremy shoots up the surgeon’s office. But before he kills the surgeon, the latter offers Jeremy a miracle solution. The surgeon brings Jeremy a woman, who carries The Beauty, who has sex with Jeremy, turning him into a whole new man (literally, as he’s played by Jeremy Pope post-transformation). 

We also discover that The Beauty was never designed to be sexually transmitted—something entirely different than the comics. There’s another strain of The Beauty, one developed by an exorbitantly wealthy man who calls himself The Corporation (Ashton Kutcher). He created The Beauty, an injection that not only transforms people physically, but also seems to have stable long-term effects. He’s determined to do whatever it takes to stop the STI, as it threatens to destroy his vast profit margins. It doesn’t help that the sexually transmitted version of The Beauty seems to kill its victims in horrifying ways after just two years. So while the detectives are on a mission to figure out what The Beauty is, The Corporation is doing whatever he can (including using his assassin, played by Anthony Ramos) to get answers.

That’s what we know so far. As only three of the eleven episodes have aired, there’s plenty more mystery to unfold in The Beauty.