Comic Review: Bee & Puppycat #2

We, once again, join Bee and Puppycat in mid-conversation with Temp-Bot. Poor Bee has to explain her embarrassing pajamas to the robot. Of course, that also means having to explain sleep.

Anyway, Temp-Bot ships the friends off to their new job on Snowglobe Planet. The clients aren’t actually home but they left the door open so Bee and Puppycat could go in to fix a music box. Unfortunately, no one told them which music box and the house is filled to the brim with them. As the pair tries to figure out which music box is broken, the door slams shut, locking them inside the house. Bee decides to try to fix the music box as they wait for the owners to return. The only way to find the broken one is to listen to each and every one until they find it.

This is where the comic gets awesome. There are five pages with QR codes. When you scan each QR code, you get a link to a YouTube video. The videos are the sounds of the music boxes. There are four functional songs and one ‘broken’ song. Not only is it a great way to differentiate the boxes, it is also a wonderful way to make a comic book more interactive. I hope they figure out ways to integrate more QR codes into future issues.

Onto the secondary story! This story, called “Cass,” is written by Frank Gibson and illustrated by Becky Dreistadt. The short story is about a woman named Cass, who lives with her brother, Deckard. Arriving home from a long day at work, Cass finds that Deckard has pretty much destroyed the kitchen. She goes to relax in her room while he cleans up. Lying on her bed, she finds a mysterious mask under her pillow. Cass flashes back to her childhood, when she wrestled in the yard with her brother. Her memory goes forward a few years to a young woman learning to actually wrestle. It turns out the mysterious mask is what she used to wear when she was a female wrestler.

While I absolutely loved the Bee and Puppycat story, I’m not so sure about Cass. It took me awhile to realize that her brother, Deckard, is the same man from the first episode of the animated series. Of course, there is nothing in the comic that connects the characters. Maybe they are hoping that you would connect the guy from those three green-tinted comic frames with the guy from the full-color animation. I don’t know. It is very confusing. I think I’d rather see the story from Deckard’s point of view instead. What was he doing before we first see him in the series? Does he have a crush on Bee and that is why he blushed when she answered the door? How did he already hear that she lost her job? So many questions! At least I still have the main Bee and Puppycat story to keep me entertained while I try to figure out what in the world is going on with the side story.

Bee