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.

It’s 1935 and all is not well in the penitentiary system. But here comes Ol’ Agnes MacPhail to bust some heads. She’s the first woman to check out the conditions in the prison and she doesn’t like what she sees. Her train of thought seems to be: “Hey, beating these guys up isn’t making them better citizens and actually might cause some problems in the long run so, maybe let’s not do that?”. The guys in Parliament assure her that she’d just too delicate, because she’s a boobhaver, to know what prison is all about. She shows them what actually goes on in the prison (I guess they’d never actually bothered to check) and seems to pretty quickly get people on her side.

It’s a good thing to remember both our first “woman MP” and that improving prisons is a good thing, so that’s nice. The “Is This Normal!?” is definitely memorable, but it is not especially useful as a quoteable line. The parliament scene reminds me of the bit in the Moment about the women in the medical system. An established patriarchy trying to shout down the women who are trying to making progress. At least that other group had some glorious sideburns. I think I settle somewhere about Four out of Six Pieces of PDR’s Reviewing System Cake here.

This Heritage Moment is all about an immigrant couple on the olden times prairies building a Soddie, which is like a house for people who don’t have access to wood. All there is to it is these people suffering to make a home for themselves set to stirring music. Brave pioneers who built (that part of) our nation.

I’ve pointed out a couple of these moments that get by on only one or two cast members, and this is like those. It does it well. This couple, their horses, and some cool facial hair are all that carries us through. They seem like a likeable pair and that makes it all work. We’re happy when they build their house at the end and we try not to think about how they probably end up dead a few winters later anyway.

To be honest, there ain’t a whole lot to say here. Perhaps the biggest failing of this one is that the woman sees something “over there” and we never find out what. It couldn’t possibly just be a weak set-up for her husbands line about “the same flat country everywhere”. She must have seen something. And Canadians need to know what. Four out of Six Pieces of PDR’s Reviewing System Cake.

Well this one is depressing. To sum it up, Tommy Prince was a really good soldier and helped out in several different wars. When he came back home, his life sucked because life pretty much sucks for all aboriginal people in Canada. And his life continued to suck until he was dead forever. But this one guy at his funeral pointed out how that was sad, so that’s a plus.

I don’t remember this one from my youth. Probably its a newer one, but even if it had aired back then I don’t think there’s any good quotes to be seared into brains in this one. I kinda like how it looks like he might be dressing himself at first, but then it turns out he’s a corpse. For some fraction of a split-second I was able to believe that he had just dressed up in his uniform to lay down in the coffin. I’d do that if I had access to a military uniform and a coffin. But sadly, no. He’s just dead is all.

Not much else to say here. I definitely think that it is worth drawing attention to the fact that First Nations people have so many disadvantages. Still, all this Moment does is draw attention to it. The fact that Tommy Prince died in 1977 and it’s still true… Well. Depressing. Three out of Six Pieces of PDR’s Reviewing System Cake.