Well, turns out The Beast King: Master of Medicines has a cinnamon roll with teeth . . .

I had seen this manga last year on Bedetheque, the site for updates on Franco-Belgian graphic novels, and the title of the French edition made me laugh: “Beast King and Medicinal Herb.” Yes, in English. Sounds like broken English, right? Not sure why it wasn’t something like Le Roi des Bêtes et les plantes médicinales. I took notice because it seemed like it was a Beauty & Beast story, but forgot about it until I saw it had been translated into English. In total, there are 3 volumes planned for 2026 in English: the 1st already published in February, the 2nd coming out in June, and the 3rd in October; but in French (and I think also in Spanish) there’s six volumes already published, in case you don’t want to wait for the English translation.

This is the story of a defeated monster boss and an a bounty hunter whose life he saves. There had been a century-and-a-half long war between humans and demons that the former won. The surviving Monsterkin are hidden in enormous dungeons, and a class of bounty hunters called Adventurers, organised in a guild and with ranks according to skill level, are out to explore and loot the treasures in these dungeons and kill the Monsterkin found living there.

A Class C Adventurer, Tina Quais, trips into the lair of a dangerous feral Monsterkin she can’t fight alone and that almost kills her, if not for Garon, the Beast King and only survivor of the six generals of the late Demon King, who rescues her and heals her wounds, but in exchange for a price: she must sign a blood pact and follow his orders.

Tina has no choice, so she agrees. She soon realises that Garon isn’t as terrible as the tales claim demons are but simply works as a doctor using medicinal herbs to heal the needy Monsterkin. And it happens that many of the Monsterkin are sick, mutilated, or badly injured from the recent war or from clashes with Adventurers, and because they have to hide deep in the dungeons to avoid the bounty hunters, they can’t go outside for help and have to endure their pain as best they can.

Interacting with them through force majeure, Tina begins to feel compassion and sympathise with them, and Garon sees that she can be an ally to help protect his monsters. After watching the king save a dragon and undergoing an emotionally harsh test to prove her trustworthiness, Tina is sent to the surface to pretend that the dungeon Garon inhabits is “cleared” to ward off other Adventurers wanting to snoop round.

In the second volume, Tina comes up with the idea that Garon also join the Adventurers’ Guild and apply to the Guild’s admission test to become a certified bounty hunter. Garon resists, mostly because of how risky it is to move round in disguise to hide his species. But he finally agrees, and goes to take the applicants’ test whilst Tina reluctantly joins a group of high-ranking Adventurers seeking to find the Beast King, about whom the Guild has just received intelligence that he’s still alive and offer a reward for. In this pickle, they meet another high-ranking Monsterkin, who has lost his wings and whom Garon tries to heal and give new wings. It is the most difficult and significant healing so far in the manga.

In the third volume, the best in terms of plot and themes, our protagonists (and Mikage, who never leaves their side) go to two new locations that we had not seen. First to the mirror castle, where they find two former Monsterkin army commanders that served under Garon in the war, one of whom is attempting a suicide manoeuvre to protect the place from the Adventurers. The place is very important for magic, and here we learn what the leylines are and why the Monsterkin exist at all, as well as learn through dreams who the general was that created this type of unique dungeons for Monsterkin. It’s a sad arc, and it’s even sadder to see how the mirror arc is resolved.

Next they go to a city on the coast known for its commercial importance, where they are surprised to see the locals’ choice of a god to worship. And for the first time we have the opportunity to see Garon as a midwife, which makes you laugh and warms your heart at the same time.

The way I have described it, The Beast King: Master of Medicines sounds like a typical Dungeons & Dragons adventure story, and to readers that have played the game and know the lore well, this manga will probably not be anything special but trite and boring. But I’ve never played Dungeons & Dragons, and I hardly know its lore by cultural osmosis, so I’m probably more lenient than other readers would be. I also remember seeing comparisons of this to the manga Frieren, which also has a post-war plot concept after humans have defeated demons in war, that were disfavourable to Beast King because it’s considered more superfluous and “lighter.” Of course, I haven’t read Frieren either (yet), so I have no point of comparison to judge by myself, which evidently also influences my more positive perception.

Even so, I can still see the weaknesses of the present manga, starting with the first volume, which is the weakest and, truthfully, it doesn’t engage the reader immediately as it should. The plot is simple and everything is presented abruptly, without preambles, warnings, or buildup; probably because it is assumed that readers know the Dungeons & Dragons-style environment and don’t need anything from the lore explained to them. And the art doesn’t help either, because it is rather run-of-the-mill and the aesthetics aren’t pretty: the Beast King looks almost like a caricature of the Cowardly Lion from “The Wizard of Oz,” and Tina is a typical manga girl with nothing that stands out. I persisted mostly because I wanted to know how the Beauty & Beast theme would be implemented in this manga, but I can understand why others would give up after the first volume and declare that Frieren is better.

The good thing is that this improves a lot by the second volume, and even more so by the third, because more serious themes are introduced, because we see more of their world, and because we learn more about the bloody Human-Monsterkin War. Although one of the POVs is human and another is half-human, the story is structured so that we sympathise with the defeated, as we learn who the real culprits of the war were and how bad the monsters had it in the aftermath. But the victors aren’t completely villainised either, because we also see honourable and good humans. But all this is shown little by little.

What I liked best about this manga isn’t so much the story, which to tell the truth hasn’t really impressed me so far because it’s not very original, as the character of the Beast King. Tina is as insipid as unsalted soup, at times she feels like a human camera rather than a leading character, and though she’s neither stupid nor lacking initiative, she doesn’t have a captivating personality. As for Mikage, the inspector of the Adventurers’ Guild, you can guess that he has an interesting backstory, but we know nothing about him aside from his profession, his rank, that he is half-human, and that he calls Garon “chief.” That’s so little, but he does have a well-defined personality, so much so that at times I would have liked the main duo to be just him and Garon, but Mikage doesn’t need the lessons about the world and its monsters that naïve Tina needs to learn.

Garon has a painful but great character growth. When we meet him, he’s a funnily-drawn lion with a spiky mane and a bit of a stuffed animal appearance. He’s such a good person who only wants to heal his monsters that you feel sorry for him, and you become fond of him. Quite a cinnamon roll, although perhaps not as sweet as your average cinnamon roll. But as the story progresses, you learn that Garon was the fiercest and most brutal of the Demon King’s top commanders, that he’s actually a demon and not a sweet talking lion, that he was in favour of fighting to the death for the extermination of humankind, that he had an unbearable ferocity, and that he didn’t support peace between both sides. A 100% mindless brute, you see.

So how did he became a zen expert in medicinal herbs dedicated only to healing, and no longer hurts or kills even a slime? Therein lies the intrigue. Something happened when he was taken down and left for dead, that must’ve affected him more deeply than losing the war, and it had such a profound impact that it caused an 180-degree turn in mentality. How this happened, I don’t know yet, but I got an idea from hints in these 3 volumes.

For me, Garon is the best part of the manga. He’s a Beast figure in both the Dungeons & Dragons sense and the fairy tale sense. There’s no curse here, Garon is a beast by nature, but his internal transformation makes him a Beast in the Beauty and the Beast sense.

Which doesn’t mean there’s also a B&B romance. There’s no romantic tension or anything like that, and as Tina is so bland, I’m happy about it. Mikage’s existence indicates that Human/Monsterkin couples are possible in this world (I told you that the Japanese aren’t averse to inter-species romance), but I don’t want a relationship between Garon and Tina. At least not for now. Not until Tina improves and grows as a character, because at this point it would be like combining a chocolate cake (Garon) and an unsweetened water porridge (Tina).

So, my sine qua non condition is that the “Beauty” has to grow inwardly, because the “Beast” has already completed his self-improvement. This is a great contrast: one matures “in real time” and the other has already done so and we only see it in flashbacks. It’s a matter of timing, which I hope Konda-sensei and Sakano-sensei keep handling well, I’d hate to see this cute story take a nosedive in future volumes.