Bee-Man: The Death of Bee-Man
Don’t you hate it when you randomly pick one comic from a new stack by a team of artists while you’re pressed for time, read it, then quickly flip through the other comics from the stack and become convinced that you inadvertently picked probably the weakest of the bunch? What’s that you say? The amount of people in the world who relate to that are probably in the single digits? Oh yeah. Anyway! These fine folks sent me about a half dozen comics (don’t fret, I’ll get to them), but look at the cover of this sucker! Of course I’m going to go with that one first. This is the story of a team of scientists who are trying to reverse the dying out of the bees, but their first attempt ended with them accidentally making “vampire bees.” Erwin (the hero of the piece) is by far the most dedicated of the bunch, but it comes at the expense of his home life and new child. He eventually starts to hallucinate that the vampire bees are talking to him (or possibly they are; I wasn’t entirely clear on that), which leads to him trusting the bees far too much and entering a controlled environment to prove that they aren’t dangerous. Multiple bee stings ensue, and the guy ends up in a coma for ten years. When he wakes up things have changed quite a bit, and that’s before he notices some gradual and then sudden changes to his own body. I honestly can’t decide if I should go into spoilers here for the rest of it. I mean, when you call your first issue “Death of Bee-Man,” the writing is very much on the wall. I’ll just say that they stuck to the science of what happens when a bee stings somebody, and even with that the ending seemed abrupt, like they had just had enough of the story. There were some funny bits and some solid quotes, but this felt like something that should have maybe been a few issues long to let it breathe. Either way, that is some cover, and I’m looking forward to getting to the rest of the books from their pile. $5
