Bee and Puppycat, a series by Natasha Allegri, best known for her work in Pendelton Ward’s Adventure Time and especially for her involvement in the Ice King’s fan fiction, saw the release of its fifth issue in late October.
The comic series began its life as a cartoon on YouTube.
Allegri wrote two episodes of Bee and Puppycat, each about five minutes long, in early August 2013. The videos were published on Frederator’s YouTube channel, Cartoon Hangover. The love for Bee and Puppycat was so overwhelming that Frederator arranged a Kickstarter to continue the cartoon series. That campaign was successfully funded almost exactly one year ago.
Now, 14 months later, Allegri and gang are celebrating that victory. Bee and Puppycat: The Series will premier on Nov. 6, and when its run is finished, will boast nine, six-minute episodes. The popularity of the series couldn’t be contained though, and a comic spawned off the massively successful cartoon.
Bee is a young, 20-something woman who is just really bad at keeping any and every job the temp agency throws at her. As she is reminded: “This is a temp agency, not a charity.”
Bee has no documentable skills and won’t even jaywalk in the pouring rain simply because she couldn’t afford a ticket if she got one. Dragging herself home after getting fired again, a wormhole opens above her head and out topples Puppycat, a small mammal with the ears of a cat and the tail of a dog.
Bee takes him home and dumpster dives for dog food, cat food and eventually eggplant-themed pet toys.
Bee eats the sympathy lasagna her friend, Deckland, gives her but when she later wakes up hungry, it’s just too bad because she doesn’t have any money for food. Luckily, Puppycat is a magical temp and gets straight to work. Thus, adventure ensues.
The first job Puppycat is assigned is to be a space-travelling chimeric babysitter of a giant fish named Wallace. Wallace has the same five-second memory of an actual goldfish, and he misses his mommy.
Unfortunately, he turns into what might be a giant, angry and bitter space princess who betrays her space outlaw lover for her space king father. It’s all sort of up in the air and hopefully the new episodes will go into more depth and explain. Puppycat might also be involved. It’s all rather tragic.
Bee and Puppycat, as a series, crosses mediums in strange ways. Using a phone app, readers can scan a QR code and an animated Puppycat will sing to them. His voice, generated through a voice-synthesizing program named Oliver, gives the character an entrancing musical quality. When Puppycat talks it’s like robots singing love songs.
Most of the comics are, artistically speaking, a beautiful heap of pastels and soft curves. Like the web cartoon, the comics are mostly short vignettes showing snapshots of Bee and Puppycat’s life together as magical temps.
So far the only lasting story arc is the one with Wallace, but there are intriguing themes that permeate both the comics and the web cartoons. There should be a short warning, not for suicidal ideation so much as for potentially suicidal imagery—at least in the intensely poignant and focused dreams that Bee has.
For a literary device that is rarely interesting and usually pretty hackneyed, Allegri manages it gorgeously with graceful imagery and beautiful colors. These quiet scenes provide moments of contemplation for Bee and the audience, and serve to break up Bee’s otherwise loud, chaotic and messy (since she loathes cleaning) life.
Bee’s unusual in a lot of ways. She’s a magical girl who hates her transformation. She’s a young 20-something who can’t handle caffeine, and she’s a woman written almost entirely by another woman without outside influence.
In the Kickstarter video, Fred Seibert, the executive producer of Bee and Puppycat calls the series, “women created by women, for more than just little kids.” And that’s what it is, and it really shows whether you’re watching or reading.
