Panel Discussion: The Beekeeper's Due, Panel 1.1
Revisiting my Eisner-nominated short story. Panel 1.1: In which we're introduced to THE BEEKEEPER and the question at the heart of this tragic revenge story.
In this series, I’m breaking down my Eisner-nominated short story The Beekeeper’s Due. There will be spoilers. To read the full story first, click here.
Panel
Script
This is just a quick note to say that this was my first comic script, so there may be some unusual formatting issues. I don’t know if this is the best way to do it. I just wanted it to be clear for the artist, and it’s the format that worked best for us.
Discussion
The Beekeeper’s Due is about a mother trying to deal with the unjust death of her young child. It was partly inspired by my feelings of fear and helplessness as the father of a young daughter during the COVID-19 Pandemic. The Beekeeper was a character who knew the kind of loss I feared and could channel her fury to actually DO SOMETHING. Even if it wasn’t the right thing. It packs a punch in just four pages.
But it wasn’t always four pages.
The first version—before even going to a script– was about seven or eight pages long. There was a lot of backstory and buildup. I was planning something like the first part of Pixar’s Up! Over the course of just a couple pages, I wanted to quickly show the birth of The Beekeeper’s daughter Amelia, see them bonding over beekeeping, then growing closer when Amelia’s father left, then show Amelia getting sick, the arrogant doctor who treated her and, finally, Amelia’s death.
But then I remembered some writing advice from Neil Gaiman’s Masterclass:
“When you’re writing short fiction, what you want, whether it’s true or not, is to feel like these characters didn’t just start to exist the moment the story began. You want to know they’ve all been in existence all along...Things have happened to them. Taken them to this point…Now its the last chapter, the final chunk of a novel you didn’t write.”
Thinking of a short story as the last chapter of novel changed everything for me.
I realized the story could be more impactful and mysterious (and cheaper to make) if we just opened onto the climax of that imaginary novel — the Beekeeper taking revenge in the wake of her daughter’s death.
In panel 1.1, the reader doesn’t know any of that yet. We just see a woman in a shed. But this panel still had to accomplish a few things. First, I wanted it to immediately introduce the character, the setting, and the vibe of the story. I wanted it to have a subtle sense of dread, and I think we achieved it. The shadowy art, the beekeeper’s concealed face, and the single caption all get at the core of our story:
“How do you measure a life’s worth?”
The second thing I needed this panel to do was establish a way to explain all that backstory I cut. So here we see the bee yard, a child’s beekeeping jacket hanging from the door, and, critically, a corkboard that we’ll get a closer look at soon.
As you can see in the script above, Débora nailed this panel perfectly. The only change I made from her first pass was asking her to darken the shadows at the top of the image and dull the colors a bit. The use of selective color was in my mind from the beginning. At first, I imagined only the honey would be in color, but Débora expanded that and it was the right call. We didn’t have any firm rules in place, but the color more or less corresponds with the things that bring her the beekeeper joy or remind her of her daughter — bees, nature, honey, etc.
That’s about it for Panel 1.1. Coming up next in panels 1.2 and 1.3, we’ll ponder a life’s worth.
Thanks for reading!