Hey you know how neither Spider-Man nor Goofy are known for beekeeping? Well, imagine they were the same guy. Now he’s a Beekeeper! I don’t know why!
This one caught me by surprise. For some reason when the companies who own Spider-Man and Goofy decided to make a comic about Goofy going through Spider-Man’s origin, they added an apiarist angle that neither of the source characters have. The whole story reads to me (and probably could actually be) like one of those Disney comics from Europe that I read and maybe everything hasn’t been translated just perfectly, so maybe I’m missing something. Maybe this makes sense over there. But I don’t have that information, so I can only go on what I see here.
What I see here is a version of Goofy called Goofy Parker who is a student who lives with his Aunt Tessie. Even before he has a superhero origin, he is a prodigy when it comes to entymology and nothing else. He barely notices that other subjects exist. He loves all insects, but the bees that he and Tessie care for are his favourites to the extent that he has named them all individually and will stop and say hi or bye to each of them on his way to school. They provide wax that he and Tessie use to keep their motorcycle nice and shiny.
Unlike Peter Parker, Goofy Parker actually seems to be liked by his fellow students. They ask him to hang out, but he’s always more interested in his insect studies and whatnot. But his origin does soon come to mirror Peter’s very quickly. Goofy discovers an unknown species of spider, it gets radioactive and bites him, he gets powers and he creates the Spider-Goofy identity to try to solve his family’s financial problems. A point of divergence here is that, where Peter ignores a criminal he could stop because he doesn’t think it matters to him, Spider-Goofy ignores the Beagle Boys as they do some crimes because he doesn’t seem to know what’s going on. While Peter loses an uncle because of his choice, Goofy loses his motorcycle, but then makes money from the whole event. Doesn’t really have the same resonance as Peter’s version of the origin doesn’t it? But anyway, after he solves the family’s money problems he also buys nice new hives for his bees.
So we have a Beekeeper who is an expert at insects (and nothing else), who also has Spider-Man powers. That is a powerful combination, to be sure. The only thing I can dock him for is that the Beekeeping is pretty incidental to the Spider-Manning half of his life. If he’d been a Bee-themed hero or something, he’d rate a five, but as it is…
Four Honeycomb out of Five. I don’t know why he’s a Beekeeper!
