It’s been a while, let’s see what PDR is up to:

Okay, yesterday I wrote my last exam of the semester, so I haven’t got class again until the new year. This is nice, because I’ve been feeling kinda mentally exhausted lately. Last year I was doing seven days a week without a day off from both work or school, but I just can’t bring myself to do that again. I assume that this is all proof that I’m too old, but I don’t want to do that again. I’m only going to be a part-time student from this point onward.

I’ve also been off work for a little while for a reason I will likely expand upon in a later post. I’ll go back this weekend, but the time with less school and work has allowed me to be more productive at other things. Kip and I are still working on a project, which I mentioned last time, but which I am still being vague about.

In more noticeable news, I have started a new feature of the site: I am reviewing fictional beekeepers. I’ve done two so far and I hope to do about four or five more before classes start back up. Once busytimes begin anew, I’ll drop down to about one beekeeper review a month, essentially filling the gap I left when I stopped doing Canadian Heritage Moment reviews. (On that note, there are still a handful of those left that I haven’t reviewed. I’ll try to do them if inspiration ever strikes.)

Haiku!

Trouble from the moon.
Reverse astronauts are here
and they want our cash.

That’s it for now. I’ll be back at some point before January, though, because experience tells me that once school starts I’ll be silent for months.

Beekeepers aren’t always on the side of good. During the Golden Age of Comics there were plenty of superheroes, which, of course, means there were even more super villains. Captain Freedom may never have made it to the big leagues of superheroes, but he had a run in Speed Comics that lasted for a few years. Probably fought a lot of supervillains in that time. In one issue, issue #35, the villain was a beekeeper.

So it seems that Captain Freedom’s deal is that he is your standard low-powered patriotic hero who hangs out with a tough kid gang (Those were popular in those days. The Newsboy Legion and the Young Allies are some of the more prominent examples.) Captain Freedom’s friends, the Young Defenders, stumble upon an argument between beekeeper Jabez Mather and his neighbor Hiram Bymore. It seems that these two have been at odds for years, and their families have been feuding for generations. This isn’t gonna end well for Hiram, because Jabez is a particularly science-minded beekeeper.

Indeed, in spite of his apparently country bumpkin nature, Jabez has successfully invented an “insect growin’ process” that makes his bees gigantic. Like the size of flying dogs or something. Also, Jabez is apparently able to control his bees by ordering them around by humming. But the first of the big bees refuses to listen to Jabez and goes out and stings Hiram’s bull to death. Hiram responds by shooting up Jabez’s hives and the beekeeper responds by sending all his huge bees out to feast on human blood! Hiram is killed pretty quickly. Pears are stolen.

The Young Defenders are the first to investigate, but Jabez incapacitates the whole lot of them by throwing “a smoking smudge pot” at them, which renders them unconscious so that Jabez can tie them up and coat them with nectar so they’ll be eaten alive by bees. As is tradition for superheroes, Captain Freedom shows up to solve the problem with punches. The hero takes out one of the big bees, but all but declares that he’s doomed. He is surrounded by angry giant bees when Jabez foolishly decides to help the bees out by throwing a jar of nitric acid he had lying around.

Jabez manages to kill all of his own bees in that one acid toss. That would be an incredibly badass move if he’d done it to almost anyone except his already-winning bees. Jabez doesn’t even think to pass it off as a change of heart, instead he just makes a break for it. It doesn’t take long for Captain Freedom to catch up to him and punch him in the face. Jabez falls into one of his own hives and is fatally stung. As he lay in Captain Freedom’s arms, he laments his folly, then dies.

This is, I assume, Jabez’s only appearance. With so little to go on, I just decided to give you a full description of his story. Now we all know the tragic tale of Jabez Mather. It’s worth noting that Captain Freedom is apparently one of those golden age comic characters that have fallen into the public domain. So if any enterprising genius out there wanted to give us a sequel where he meet the rest of Jabez’s beekeeping family, it would be totally legal.

As far as supernatural beekeeping powers, Jabez provides a good showing: Giant bee creation and supernatural bee control humming are both impressive Beekeeping powers, and his use of smoke to take out the kids is pretty good too (I assume the Young Defenders are probably captured a lot, but still he got them pretty easily). It’s important to note that Jabez does not create his bees with evil intent, he just figures big bees will make a lot of honey. There is a possibility that the bee that killed Hiram’s bull was acting on Jabez’s hatred of Hiram, but that’s never said. As he said in his dying words, Jabez didn’t want to be a killer. It’s just that when Hiram shot up his hive, Jabez gave in to Beekeeper Rage. That was his downfall. So how does he rate?

Two Honeycombs out of Five. Beekeeper Rage squanders the potential of another promising apiarist.

Look, I have made no secret of the fact that I think Beekeepers are underrated. There is really no good reason why the apiarist should not be venerated among the paragons of badassness such as ninjas and pirates and such. To prove that this obsession is not wholly based on my own whims, over the next year or so, I’m going to take you all on a tour of the Beekeepers of fiction and at the end, you’ll all agree with me.

Fist Puncher. I mentioned Fist Puncher way back when I first heard about it. It is the tale of a group of vigilantes who fight their way across the city of San Cruces to rescue some kidnapped beauty queens. One of those vigilantes is a beekeeper, known only as the Beekeeper.

Like all of the Fist Puncher vigilantes, the Beekeeper is a stone-cold badass. In addition to all the standard punching and and jumping and kicking (and a special whirlwind kick thing) of a typical brawler hero, the Beekeeper’s got a swarm of bees to help. With her “Bee.S.P.” (like ESP, but bee-related) she can summon her bees to fly around the level just stinging any enemies that are around. She can also just throw a ball of bees right in an enemy’s face. I played through the game on a Beekeeper-only run and she was able to surmount every obstacle she came across. She rode motorcycles (and ostriches), she fought criminals and robots and Nazis and everything else, she even gained the ability to come back from the dead Twice Per Level. That’s a tough beekeeper.

But here’s the thing, I’m about to give away the end of the game: it turns out that the vigilantes might be acting a little bit rashly. Without going into specifics, it turns out that this cross-town rampage gives the real enemies exactly what they want. This highlights something we’re going to see a lot as I do these reviews: Beekeeper Rage. Beekeepers have anger issues. This is a consistent fact. This particular Beekeeper at least has the excuse that she is going along with her friends in her rampage, but peer-pressure doesn’t make it right. There’s apparently another mode that continues the story, but even if she and her friends get their act together there, the damage has been done.

So, altogether, what do we have? We’ve got a Beekeeper with bees willing to fight and die for her, apparent supernatural powers, and genuine fighting skills. If she could reign in her anger, she’d score higher. As it is, this mysterious Beekeeper’s rating is:

Four Honeycombs out of Five. We’ll soon see that that’s a pretty high score.

Squarbok

Hiding on Earth to avoid having to pay off his gambling debts in his native demonic realm, Squarbok now lives in a cheap apartment above a Thrakodacian restaurant in Miami. He likes to keep it low key, he generally eats food that gets thrown out at the end of the night, but lately a detective from his demonic world has been sniffing around and asking questions. Squarbok is going to need help, but who would help a demon like him?

As always, I am drawing inspiration from elsewhere. I drew the guy just because I wanted to draw a weird bighead demonguy, but when it came time to give him a story, I recalled the way that in the Buffy and Angel shows, a lot of demons were basically just weird looking dudes with average lives. So thus so is Squarbok.

Abigail Red

Ghosts greatly outnumber the living, that’s obvious. The Secret Government doesn’t like any group that outnumbers them. To help keep SecGov City safe, the Secret Government has declared it a No Ghost Zone. All SecGov robots randomly gain special abilities at their “birth” and Abigail Red is a 2003 Generation SecGov Robot whose powers included seeing beyond the normal light spectrum, auditory enhancements, and control of a strange otherworldly energy field. In a rare competent move, the Secret Government put her abilities to a good use, making Abigail the official Ghost Hunter of SecGov City. In a more typically incompetent move, the fact that she couldn’t locate any ghosts in the City led her bosses to send her abroad to hone her skills under the teaching of some monks. SecGov City is currently unprotected from ghosts.

This is the first time I’ve done a Super Sunday post for a character in a work I’m actually doing (admittedly slowly during the school year). I just don’t think I’m likely to have a reason to introduce this character in the story of that strip any time soon, so I figured why not? It’s my website. I do what I want.