Kaydee Festermeyer appeared on a cartoon called Dicktown, a comedy about the “boy detective” genre. Kaydee’s story is one of the show’s mysteries, and I’m about to reveal a bunch of spoilers, if you care about any of that.

Kaydee is definitely a person who found herself early, and so, even when she was a high school student she was essentially who she would be for life. That includes keeping bees. We don’t actually know the extent or details of her beekeeping, but she had what one character described as “a super dangerous beehive” in school. And as an adult, she still has bees, which she uses as a weapon. I am left assuming that she is a pretty successful beekeeper.

Also, she just has a general air of “badassery” that works for what I am seeking in a Beekeeper. She cures her own tobacco that she uses to make her own cigars, in school she had a pet raccoon named Ripper that she used to guard her locker because it didn’t lock, and as an adult she has an outfit/helmet that makes her look like some kind of motorcycle ninja while she drives a Polaris Slingshot, which is some manner of outlandish vehicle that really serves only to signify “cool” status. Oh, and she can set traps too. In general, she’s just tough.

In school, Kaydee was wrongfully blamed for a crime by the show’s protagonist John Hunchman. The school took the boy detective at his word and Kaydee wound up being expelled. As adults, she enacted a plan to get revenge on Hunchman, and it really seems like she’s got a bad case of the Beekeeper Rage. But actually, Kaydee is not as terminally rage-filled as it might first appear. She makes it clear that after being expelled, she went on with her life and put it all behind her until she moved back to town as an adult and found Hunchman still doing the detective thing. That brought up the bad memories and Hunchman didn’t even remember who she was. Her name aside, her anger is not something that had been festering, but was fresh and impulsive. Ultimately, after Hunchman realized he’d been wrong, Kaydee accepted his apology and ceased hostilities. She wanted justice to be done and once it was, she was able to back down. Good for her.

Four Honeycomb out of Five.

Today’s review is of a Beekeeper who appeared in the Eisner-nominated comic strip The Beekeeper’s Due. It’s only four pages, so you should check it out. It’s not bad. But… how does the Beekeeper rate?

I hope you read it, because I’m about to spoil every aspect without providing the actual experience of reading the thing. Violet is a single mother who had a beekeeping operation with her daughter, Amelia (the setup reminds me of the Williams family from Umma). All indications are that they were relatively successful and certainly happy until Amelia fell sick. The young girl died due to complications from a surgery to remove her appendix.

Understandably, Violet was upset. The story never gives us the certainty to prove it, but taking Violet’s word for it, there is a high likelihood that the doctor performing the surgery was in an unfit state. Violet tried to deal with this through the courts, but the doctor was acquitted. That’s when Beekeeper Rage really took Violet. She poisoned some honey and got it to the doctor. He ate it and died.

Now, let’s see. I give Violet credit for trying to deal with things through the legal system first. That would help me to give her the benefit of the doubt against her first big mistake: she gave the poisoned honey to the doctor via a gift basket delivery. We don’t know if the doctor has children, but he does have at least one person (probably a wife) who lives with him, and leaving poisoned honey is not a precision strike. Innocents could have eaten that.

Probably that would have left me with a 2/5 Beekeeper rating, but there’s one other thing: after her successful assassination, Violet returned home and burned down her whole operation, the greenhouse and the hives. It’s symbolic, I suppose, of the way her life was ruined by the whole situation. She thanks the bees and apologizes as she does it, but still: once you burn down your hives, you’re not really a Beekeeper anymore.

One Honeycomb out of Five.