Up front, I guess I should say that after finishing the article, I found Bee And Puppycat an incredibly disappointing set of comics because I made the fool mistake of beliving they were ever going to be something they never told me they would be. I saw the cover art showing happy people in an energetic state and the idea of a temp magical girl resulting in perhaps something like an adventure or a quest or a hijink and never considered how many pages would instead be about comparing poo and chocolate. Still, there’s an interesting history to what these comics are and I’m sure you might like them if you try them and you know you’re only getting the packing peanuts between a story rather than any kind of story in and of itself.
This was a little bit of a journey.
Bee & Puppycat is a thing that has been in my nebulous area of space, one of those aspirational pieces of media I may have mentioned because I thought it looked good but never said anything about what was in it because y’know, there… wasn’t… anything in it… as far as I remembered. There was a trailer, and then a promise that it would show up later, and then eventually, I saw Bee and Puppycat comics in a Humble Bundle.
The ‘dead series with hanging plot threads got comic book followup’ is a media trajectory that I’m familiar with. I mean it happened to Charmed so when I saw the comics in a bundle, I bought it, and figured at some point I would get around to reading it.
I bought these comics in 2015.
I read them today.
If you’re not familiar with Bee And Puppycat the premise is that there’s this girl named Bee, and one day, she gets a new pet, called Puppycat. Puppycat is something that may be a puppy, or may be a cat, but is also definitely linked to a temp magical girl agency. And uh, that’s that. That’s all there is, really, in the pitch. A girl gets a job as a temporary magical girl travelling across space doing random things.
It isn’t like it’s a bad series but it’s also, looking at it, kind of a hard series to describe from its pitch. That’s basically it, it’s a sort of low-stakes cute thing about being a loser with a temp job but the temp job is with your cat and you got to other planets. There’s a giant robot.
If it was British, I’d say it was twee. As it is, it’s American, so it’s a twee substitute.
This year I have set myself a goal of trying to read at least one piece of fiction, or try to read one piece of fiction, each month. With things like a job and a youtube channel and a phd, reading fiction has fallen by the wayside for me in a big way. I was able to watch more anime by making a space in my life for that, and reading feels like the next thing to recover my time on. Last year I read a bunch of books – but ‘a bunch’ means like, ‘six to ten.’ And of course, when I have to read books for my PhD – because, yeah, that’s a thing you do, you read a lot and it’s not fun reading and when you’re doing it you employ different kinds of ways of thinking than you do when you’re reading fun fiction – it makes reading other ways harder and less interesting. A book has to really catch my attention to get there.
(I did read all of Gideon the Ninth in a week, for example.)
This also means I’ve been trying to look at the books I accrued thinking ‘I’ll read it later’ and checking them out, hence finding this dusty ebook in a 2015 Humble Bundle purchase. 2015, that’s almost nine years ago that I bought the comics of a series that – as it turns out, ran from 2013 to 2016. I bought comics for a show where I’d only seen the trailer because I assumed the show had failed and the comics were the way the fans got something and reading the comics, I’d get at least something of the Bee and Puppycat experience. It was a purchase for novelty’s sake, an aspirational want.
There are a bunch of TV shows from around that period that you may kinda remember but not remember their resolutions. The big one is Adventure Time, but that was a TV show, and it has a lot of the sinew that makes up Bee And Puppycat‘s similar-feeling production. Not ‘calarts style’ like shitheads will invoke, but similar joke timing and structure, similar relationship to short-form media, and a similar lack of need to provide conventional setups and payoffs. Not the same genre, but similar movement. The things I mean though are shows like Bravest Warriors, which is a show that was being made On Youtube For Youtube, a phenomenon I guess you’d now consider for shows like Hazbin Hotel and its related spinoffs of designs that make me imagine ‘what if Tim Burton was into anime and I didn’t suck?’
Those shows, as I understand the narrative, existed because of the same reason a lot of cool things that require a huge budget existed on the internet: Someone thought they could monetise something on the internet much more cheaply than they ever could and as a result, over-invested in a space that then couldn’t sustain them. There’s a reason why you may remember ‘Pewdiepie was being paid by Disney.’ Cartoon Hangover was a result of someone paying enough money for it to exist and then it stumbling from place to place with the infrastructure for its own existence but not ways to make enough money to continue to exist.
This is the story of the internet, by the way. You are surrounded by weird detritus that grew very big in the name of making a profit in some nebulous way and failed to make a profit. Very few things that succeed on the internet make the money they assume they’re going to make, and that’s why they all crumple and fail when the thing that keeps them going is money. Weird web novels and long form roleplay spaces are going to survive because nobody ever imagined they could make money, but tumblr itself has been passed from place to place as a desperate hot potato losing money every time because it’s just something enormously successful at engaging its users and not good at doing things that result in making meaningful money.
Anyway, Bee and Puppycat.
What was I expecting?
What was I hoping for?
I don’t know what Bee and Puppycat is. I just have the books. I bought the books because I thought the premise was cool and figured I’d get around to reading them. Today, I did.
And y’know what?
They’re cute. They’re fine. They are essentially a webcomic of characters durdling around in a world where they have money anxiety. Webcomics, if you’re not aware, are a sort of online comic book where you could have mediocre art or bad jokes but if your vibes were good and the right kinds of conveniences lined up you’d have a fanbase that you could use to support the very modest project and over long enough timelines you’d become Ctrl-Alt-Delete or its sinoff The Penny Arcade.
Bee and Puppycat is a fine little comic but it’s not about anything. I read a volume and five more issues of it and the result is a few laughs about a story standing in one spot about how it sucks to be 22, in a temp job, having to clean your house, and also a magical girl with a teleporting puppycat. It’s really ambitious stuff really, the idea that hey, what if your life featured objectively cool things but we really wanted to dwell on how everything in your life was still quite bad and you couldn’t enjoy anything. It has space travel and magical powers and in the end it all comes down to someone dissatisfied with her job staring at a snack at the grocery store and going ‘ACK’. It’s relatable, but only because it suggests that even in a world that can imagine time travelling magical cat aliens, the idea of being freed from capitalism is beyond us all.
It is Cathcaesque.