Abstract
Chris Ware’s comic conglomeration Building Stories (2012) has already received a lot of attention, but one of its protagonists played a subordinated role so far: Branford. The Best Bee in the World. This essay seeks to shed light on this character, his graphic and stylistic appearance as well as his relationship with the human protagonists. By referring to findings of gender and masculinity studies, human-animal studies as well as cultural studies, this essay investigates how the animal character functions as a substitute for humanness and simultaneously is in a constant correlation with the human protagonists. Furthermore, I will examine the socio-cultural implications of animal representation, especially the entanglement of the bee character with gender and identity constructions, as well as the questioning of the reading viewers’ own anthropocentric perspective.
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Notes
- 1.
In the following I will use the designations Ware gave the individual parts of Building Stories in a completion chart (see Ware 2017, p. 235).
- 2.
Another piece, the children’s book, shows on one page (September 23rd, 2000, 7 a.m.) a more ‘realistically’ depicted bee on the wall of a house, reminiscent of the Branford storyline, but not explicitly invoking it.
- 3.
The following explanations are based on my conviction that there is no hierarchical dichotomy between humans and animals but, in David Herman’s words, “that humans, as members of larger biotic communities, occupy one niche within the broader domain of creatural life” (Herman 2018, p. 3). This also results in the negation of the anthropocentric and traditional idea of the supremacy of humans over animals (see Haraway 2016, pp. 91–198; Steiner 2015). ‘Human’ and ‘animal’ characters are thus to be understood as abbreviations for the terms ‘human animals’ and ‘non-human animals’.
- 4.
The expression ‘reading viewers’ is used in order to describe more precisely the recipients and the mechanisms of reception: when opening a comic book, the recipients are first viewers as they perceive the entire double page or the single page spread in its visual structure. Then they turn successively to the single panels, an action that is interrupted and expanded by the simultaneous observation of a single or double page.
- 5.
The added phrase resembles another and much better known character from Chris Ware’s work: Jimmy Corrigan. The Smartest Kid on Earth, with whom Branford has some characteristics in common.
- 6.
Although the common term ‘queen bee’ is highly anthropomorphized I will use it in lack of a better one for referring to the adult, mated female bee responsible inter alia for a bee population’s reproduction.
- 7.
The anthropomorphic character Branford is inspired by the painting Crying Bee (1996) by artist Bruce Linn (see Ware 2012, imprint on the box lid).
- 8.
In addition to Maya the Bee, which has been used in children’s entertainment across all media since the mid-1970s, comics include the anthropomorphic animal characters Bum Bill Bee (in George Herriman’s Krazy Kat and later as a newly conceived protagonist of a short comic series in the 1940s), the Western series Buffalo Bee (late 1950s/early 1960s), and the superhero comics Bee-29 The Bombardier from the 1940s. All these characters have in common that they are minor characters or were very short-lived series. The animated film Bee Movie (2007) can be regarded as one of the larger film productions of recent years, in which the ecological importance of bees is also emphasized. Commenting on Bee Movie, Ware wrote in his notes for Building Stories: “it was as if Hollywood was reading my mind, or something” (Ware 2017, p. 234).
- 9.
Applied to bees, this means that although scientific research can be done on how facet eyes function and which color spectrum is visible to bees, there is always only the one possibility to ask with human eyes how bees see the world. This circumstance strengthens rather than breaks up the anthropocentric point of view.
- 10.
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Acknowledgements
This essay was written in connection with my doctoral project which has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No. 713600. In addition to this generous support, I am also very thankful to Sarah Sandfort for her attentive reading and helpful suggestions. Furthermore, I owe gratitude to Chris Ware for kindly granting permission to reproduce extracts from his work.
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Eckhoff-Heindl, N. (2020). Branford the Best Bee in the World. The Socio-Culturally Imprinted Self of Anthropomorphic Bodies. In: Eckhoff-Heindl, N., Sina, V. (eds) Spaces Between. Springer VS, Wiesbaden. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-30116-3_10
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