Well, if I'm gonna use this thing, I'd better use it. Here's a little backstory on the project called "Honeybees From Heck".
As one of the vagillion times I was trying to get a comic started while I was in one of my "throw everything at the wall and see what sticks" phases, I was attempting a simple slice of life comic. Though, with me, oddly enough - and I DO mean "oddly" - I just can't seem to wrap my head and creative juices around "normal". Every time I try, "slice of weird" is the closest I can get.
I was thinking of protagonists and couldn't get anything down. I tried to go with my go-to "Normal White Guy" character, Warren Abernathy as the protagonist
At the time, I swore I was the only comicker out there not making some sort of porn comic. I tried that. I wasn't right for it. Hardcore, bodily fluids drenched copulation, anyway. Cheesecake, I could do, though. Mind you, that's not where the comic went (at first), but it was a relatively new idea - for ME, anyway. After all, in the name of
what TV Tropes calls Author Appeal, I do have a habit of drawing bigger girls with rather pronounced chests. My girlfriend teases me about that. So much so, that in true Johnny-Octavius fashion, I had to make a comic about it:
That's neither here nor there. The meat of the discussion, so to speak is that not able to think up normal scenarios for a normal protagonist, I decided to go the weird, one-off kinda non-sequitur route. Like a Far Side comic or something. As far as protagonists, I decided to go the Hanna-Barbera route. Take an already existing property, tweak it and go from there.
I had already done that a few times with my favorite movie, but I decided to try again, delving into my myriad project for a smart-ass, a man-child, a stoic genius and an
Only Sane Man type. As I said, I'd done that before and it didn't work. It didn't work that time, either, despite the mix & match tactic. That was when I decided to take a radical left turn and gender-flip them all. After all, at the time (and still to this day, if we're honest) "cute girl protagonist" equals readers, particularly if she's sexualized.
Mind you, I didn't go the sexualized route right off the bat. I just tried for normal comics.
For the names of the protagonists, I gave the girls boys' names, as I had known a few pretty girls with boys' names thoughout my younger days that I was totally crazy for.
Thus came Reggie, Vinnie and Dave, or, Regina, Lavinia and Davida.
You can probably tell from the cameos in panel 3 and the reference to Cap getting killed in Marvel Comics, how old this idea is.
Vinnie (with the purple bangs) actually came first as she was a previous attempt at a protagonist in a single cartoon. I added Reggie and Dave later, for this project. I renamed Vinnie to "Clyde" for reasons unremembered, just now and added a 4th girl and gave HER the name Vinnie. I tweaked their personalities to be that of the Real Ghostbusters and years later would tweak their body types and such as well as making Vinnie of Latina descent in order to make them less generic webcomic characters.
I'd also changed the name of the comic a few times over the years - From Boys of Bell City to Trouble in Paradox to the current Honeybees From Heck.
Boys of Bell City stemmed from their boy's nicknames.
Finally, I went with Honeybees From Heck, as I had another adventure comic idea about a group of all
-female, bee-themed assassins that I called the Honeybees from Hell that never went anywhere.
I took the name and changed it slightly, as I was going to call the city/town that the girls were from Heck, California. Or Heck, Oregon or whatever state I was going to put them into.
Since then, there have only been a few Honeybees from Heck pages, but I am back to making them.
Instead of sequential comics that tell an ongoing tale, and doing the Jenny Everywhere thing, I decided to go opposite - instead of the girls travelling to parallel universes, I'd decided that they simply exist across the multiverse. In short, every time you see the foursome of girls, it's a different Reggie, Vinnie, Clyde and Dave.
Thus far, the new(ish) formula is working.
Of course, there was also an element of cheesecake that I included ad have since made a conscious decision to include more, including more blatant nudity and sexual situations.
Of course, wouldn't you know that as soon as I added more T&A (&D, too!), this comic got a rather large boost in popularity. Not the first time this has happened - with these very characters, even!
I probably should have made her eyes bigger.
