This comic was created during the Graphic Novel Workout class I’m taking on Saturdays. The exercise was to create a comic with bug characters in which every panel used a different type of speech bubble. For fun, you can go through and see how many different types you can identify.

I was rather surprised that I came up with something that is a somewhat coherent narrative, given that I think we only had 5-10 minutes to draw this. I’m a beekeeper, though, so there was lots of fodder rolling around in my subconscious about bees.

To make things even more interesting, I decided to push myself out of my artistic comfort zone and try a more primitive style. I bumped up the size of my pen line to *gasp* 17 pixels, and played around with how much expressiveness I could get out of simple shapes and variations in line thickness. (I tried to give up my beloved G-pen and use a more conventional marker stroke, but I missed being able to vary line thickness.)

I’m pretty pleased with how the art came out. My one quibble is that it looks rather flat. I think screentones would be too busy, given the simple lines. I thought about color fills, but wasn’t  sure. I may give that a try later on. 

One last insider note: this is what I worked on during the election, to keep distracted and sane. The title “Bee Kind” is both a plea to the world and a pun on man-kind. Also, since the life of bees is a bit harsh, there’s some irony there, too.

Hope you and the ones you love are health, safe, have moments of happiness and joy… and may we all know peace.

Syne

P.S. Second insider note. I deliberately used lower-case for the bees, to emphasize their smallness and make the all-caps of HONEY stand out more.