More Honeybees From Heck

 

Honeybees From Heck

 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

but honestly, I got bored before I even finished the thought. Of course, nowadays, Warren has a place in the Tales From the Spiffee Burger comic.

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.

I went with Trouble in Paradox to signify that they would be travelling from reality to reality, sort of like Jenny Everywhere, but I nixed that idea at the last minute because I already had a Jenny Everywhere in play.

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!

Remind me to tell you the Stella & Celeste (and "Shameless") story, sometime.

Forward

 I've been plotting and planning and deliberating on whether or not to make this blog since New Years Day. It took me three and a half weeks to come to the decision.... and I keep forgetting that I have it. Moreover - part of me wants to go back and post ALLLL my comics here. Another part says that I should simply post what I make NOW and move forward.

One of the main reasons that I want to place stuff here is that about a year and a half ago, my external harddrive, which housed about 8 years of my work, writings and personal pictures went tits-up and took a big chunk of my life and memories with it.. That is the ONLY reason I even fuck with social media these days and also have made this space. I don't want that to happen again. This blog, along with several Discord accounts, ComicFury and even the DeviantArt account I kept for my superhero stuff is mainly to make sure that my "Digital Footprint" actually remains, in some capacity.

So, to that end, I guess I will post mostly the new stuff and occasionally some of my favorite old stuff. If I can wrangle any personal memories from the old FB account that I can't find the password to, I'll post it under the private feature or to one of the other accounts with a private feature. One can do a URL link to the pics on this page, right?

Anyway, here's the most recent page from Honeybees From Heck to get the proverbial ball rolling:

Haulin' Ass to Lollapalooza!

 Here We Go Again!!

It's been a while since I gave Blogspot a try, but I'll be honest - I hate modern "Social Media".

Like, ALL of it! Even the ones I LIKE (BlueSky and Instagram... and that second one is really just for the overwhelming number of chubby girls whose entire 'Instagram Persona & Presence' consists of bouncing their ridiculously oversized breasts into their cameras while the worst music in the world plays for the sake of some snarky-ass 'meme'. Don't get me wrong. I'm a red-blooded American pervert cartoonist with an almost stereotypical obsession with gigantic (natural) breasts, but seriously! When did this become a 'thing'? And why wasn't I notified on Day One?!) - Even the ones I like have become tedious.

Being the Old Fart that I am, I miss the heyday of LiveJournal. I miss blogs and journals in general because I am a journaler. A writer. I enjoy expressing my thoughts in full sentences instead of truncated 300-character (or less) text-soup full of abbreviations, L33t5p3ak, 'modern slang' and sheer illiteracy for the sake of manufactured brevity that's supposed to appeal to those short on both brains and attention spans. That's a self-fulfilling prophecy, "BTW".

Also, I miss the days when one could post as many pictures and photos as a rudimentary knowledge of HTML would allow instead of a maximum of four - or worse, ONE - per post! I'm a CARTOONIST, for fuck sakes! So, I have created this page in order to post said thoughts and cartoons, mostly unfiltered, just in order to have a place to do so that isn't DEVIANTART (don't get me started), FURAFFINITY, as I outgrew my 'furry phase' over a decade and a half ago, or out-of-the-way, niche-y spaces like NEWGROUNDS, MASTODON or PILLOWFORT.

So, that being said, here's a smattering of the stuff I'm doing these days. Most of my sequential comics are already being hosted on ComicFury and The Duck Webcomics - both of which I am still enjoying, but I, for some dumb reason, feel weird about posting Nonsequential Arts and One-shot Comics there.

On January 1st, I launched the newest version of my old autobio comic, Shrimp Fried Riot - and took out MOST of the autobio elements. Perhaps this time, the whole damn thing won't come out like some kind of illustrated mid-life crisis turned suicide note.

The protagonists, Mutt & Ozzie are the replacements for 'original' Octavius (me.)

At some point in the future of this blog, I will go back and (re)post all the original Shrimp Fried Riot comics. Also, with the permission of David "ProfEtheric" Hickmon, I started an ongoing comic taking place in a 'SpiffeeBurger' restaurant, which started in his comic, Autumn Bay.

My Spiffee comic began in the pages of my comic "Never Odd or Even";

This was sort of a "back door pilot" that introduced the characters for the ensuing comic:

Things seems to be going pretty well with it, so far.

I also brought back The Honeybees From Heck after a couple years' hiatus. What better way to reintroduce my favorite Girls with Boys' Names AND cement my notion to add more gratuitous nudity into my comics in this, the New Year than with this page:

I figure - why not? Every other graphic artist on the Internet is making pics of random naked people doing random naked things. Why should I be any different?!

And, of course, there's my superhero themed - or should I say Super VILLAIN themed comic, "I Was A Teenage Super Villain", which I am STILL doing 5 years in.

I am in the middle beginning of Chapter 7. So far, only a few members of the titular team have even been seen in this chapter, as I have introduced two other teams in order to set up future storylines, but they'll be back!

And, indeed the whole point for making this blogspot:

Random pics, pin-ups, jokes, NSFW content and Nerd Rage that I really can't post too many other places without breaking the rules or offending the sensibilities of the community at large.

So, this is who I am and what I do. If you dig it, feel free to stick around.