“‘Your average beekeepers usually wear gloves,’ he explained. ‘A lot of the brave ones use gloves with no fingers and thumbs so they can work with the bees more easily.’

Mr. Andretti thumped himself on the chest and went on. ‘But your truly outstanding beekeeper – such as myself – likes to work with his bare hands. My bees trust me.'”

Mr. Andretti is a beekeeper who appears in a Goosebumps novel called “Why I’m Afraid of Bees” and, as the above quote proves, he’s kind of a boastful sort. I fully admit that when I set about reading this book, I was under the impression that the beekeeper was going to be the bad guy, responsible somehow for the main kid getting his brain switched into a bee’s body. Disappointingly, that ain’t the case. The kid gets himself into that mess on his own. Andretti is just an ancillary character, the kid’s neighbor. He’s seems to be a decently successful beekeeper, though he’s kind of a jerk. He seems to know that the main kid is afraid of bees and likes to make him think the bees are out of control just to laugh when he gets scared. He also tends to yell sarcastic remarks at the kid if he catches the kid staring at him. And he’s got a strong tendency to laugh at his own bad jokes. I can only assume that all this jerkish behavior is Andretti’s way of dealing with a relatively mild case of Beekeeper Rage.

I’m taking Andretti at his word that his bees trust him. He also claims to “have complete control of those bees at all times.” He apparently doesn’t mean this in the sense of literally having mental control of the bees (he uses a net to catch straggler bees), but this is as close as Andretti gets to any kinds of powers or badassery. With that in mind, I can only give him:

Two Honeycombs out of Five.

Snap

In the vast underground kingdom of King Mederex, there are several kinds of people. The normal humans and the mystical red people are the ruling class. Several other groups, strong hairy ogre types and talking cats among them, make up a middle class who are living well. The lizard people are the lowest class. And they’re sick of it.

Snap is the illegitimate daughter of a Lizard Man shaman and she has inherited some of his mystical power. Though she doesn’t know about her true parentage, she has begun to find out about her abilities, and she’s using them to strike at the upper classes whenever possible. She’s been doing a lot of vandalism and petty theft on one hand, but she also steps up against the abuses of those in power against those who are powerless. Does this make her a good guy or a bad guy? For now, it depends who you ask, and only time will tell where she goes from here.

Bally the Crystal Ball

Hey everybody! It’s Bally! It’s Bally the Crystal Ball! Let’s all hang out with Bally!

Bally is a talking, flying crystal ball and he’s here to fly around and talk to us. There’s no crystal ball that can do that better than Bally can.

When the idea of a flying, talking crystal ball came to me, I thought “that sounds easy to draw” so I drew it. And there he is. I have no idea really what I’m going to do with the character now, though. If I ever make a wizard-themed puzzle game, maybe Bally can be the tutorial guide.