FEATURED TF: Beach Blanket Beauties

This week, I’m going to feature a work by a fellow genre author, so instead of my usually comprehensive pictures and plotlines, I’m going to keep those to minimum to diminish spoilers.

If you’ve been a member of this community for a time now, then it’s highly probable you know DreamTales’ work, since he’s one of the few who produces dedicate material about Age Transformations. He also focuses in other genres, particularly growing and shrinking, and he usually ends up mixing them, so if you’re reading a comic where a girl undergoes AP, chances are she’s also going to end up as a giantess.

But since I’m not into that, I’ll start by reviewing one of the comics that focuses purely on the Age TF, namely Beach Blanket Beauties.

Now, it’s probable you’ve read the story of the same name, also by DreamTales. This is an adaptation, though it features major departures from the original.

The comic starts with DreamTales’ stock characters, Suzy (blonde) and Marilyn (brunette), a couple of statuesque women who seem to be around their mid-twenties.

They are mortified because they haven’t caught the attention of a guy yet (which is usually the drive of choice in DreamTales’ characters). The only ones on the beach are around 18, and thus too young and wouldn’t be interested in them. Yeah, right.

Enter Mandy, a redhead little girl (her age is literally impossible to tell. She looks 12 in one panel, and 7 on the next) who Suzy has babysat in the past.

Mandy has access to a ray gun that can make the girls younger, so that they can woo the boys (again, yeah, right).

Since that’s the author major selling point, I don’t think it’s an spoiler to tell you the gun works further than they anticipated, making them much younger than intended.

Meanwhile, Mandy switches the gun's settings and fires it on herself.

Mandy grows up into a beautiful young woman who can rival the former Suzy and Marilyn. She immediately becomes the sensation at the beach (adult men suddenly abound there, despite the fact Suzy and Marilyn had been unable to find them).

From there on, I won’t detail anything else, except that Mandy tries to humiliate the others as much as she can.

That is, in fact, the defining trait of the story, and of all of DreamTales’ comics. Whenever I struggle with his work, I simply remind myself that we pursue completely different things. What I like about Age TFs is a character finding itself better and empowered, and thus, that's what I showcase in my stories. DreamTales obviously has a fetish for the opposite: the complete humiliation of a character. The empowered ones are just there to further humiliate the other one.

And that’s fine, really. Everyone likes different things.

My main grip is when you replay the same scenario over and over again. If I review more DreamTales’ comics in the future, you’ll find many of the same points that we have here: the beach, the same humiliation devices (fall of their clothes, being spanked and bossed around, etc…), the horny girls who aren’t interested in anything but overly muscled guys, etc.

And then there’s those stock characters. Suzy and Marilyn. Or Lauren and Betsy in other stories. That would be fine if they were part of an overarching narrative, like Ageiss does monthly, but in this case, the story resets itself each time. And the problem with that is that you end up looking at the same characters transforming over and over.

The art is, as usual with DreamTales, excellent. This one is drawn by one of his most frequent collaborators, PalComix, and he’s very apt at drawing beautiful females. The images are also beautifully colored. I think those panels I shared will stir your appetite for the whole thing.

The beautiful illustrations aren’t accompanied by a strong script, though. It’s not only the lack of innovation between one comic and the others, it’s that all the situations are amusingly improbable, and they –and the dialog- often play like the story of one of those stereotypical porn films they parody elsewhere, though I believe this one is among the lesser offenders in the author’s repertoire, and thus one of the best.

Now, is it worth it despite that? Definitely, considering the shortage of material in this genre.

If you don’t have it, check this purchase link:

http://www.dreamtalescomics.com/Blog/2011/beach/