It’s Cain! From the Bible! The show Supernatural kinda plays fast and loose with the stories it takes from the Bible, but the basics of the story of Cain and Abel are there. Cain killed his brother. The reasons may be different and the results may be different, but the core is still that. And, in the world of Supernatural, after Cain killed his brother, he was marked with his eponymous Mark and it kept him alive (even when he tried to kill himself) and drove him to kill more. He went from being a human to being a demon, and even served as the most powerful of the Knights of Hell. He didn’t like it, but he spent thousands of years. But he eventually got out. He fell in love with a human woman and, though it didn’t end well, he swore he’d never pick up his blade again. He retired and went off the grid. And what did he do next? He kept bees!

With the Mark of Cain functioning in a way not unlike Beekeeper Rage, it makes sense he’d find the occupation to his liking. He refers to keeping bees as “very relaxing” and expresses admiration for the animals themselves. It keeps him on the right path for more than a century, he seems to be good at it.Sadly, when he does, because of the plot of the show, take up killing again (specifically going after killers), we don’t see him keeping bees again.

In most ways Cain is as powerful as, say, Beorn was, and maybe moreso. He’s got all kinds of magic abilities. We’re told Cain is one of the most powerful demons in this show’s mythology. He could have rated very high, if he’d just not given up on the beekeeping so easily.

Four Honeycomb out of Five.

I have to note that, like Friar Tuck, Cain exists in the space of legend. Could the popular image of Cain grew so that him being a beekeeper became a well known facet of the tale? Well, it seems less likely to stick than it could for Tuck.

This episode has characters named Fred, Ned, and Ed. What are they doing over here?

I’ll say right off that this is another one where Vincent meets some allies (a couple named Ellen and Ed) who learn about the aliens and survive to the end of the episode but then never show up again to help. The one difference is that it is clearly explained that Ellen has a history of mental issues and being disbelieved and she can’t bring herself to wade back into that sort of scene. Still, in this episode they are plenty helpful, because in this episode they help David Vincent destroy an alien plot to make insects eat humanity!

As happens a lot, since these Invaders are bad at their jobs, Ellen stumbles across some aliens doing alien things. They try to kill her using some locusts they have weaponized, but she escapes and her story winds up in the newspaper, attracting David Vincent to town like a moth to a flame. He does get beat up by Ed at first, but he’s persistent, so he uncovers a plot by the Invaders to create a machine that makes insects (even butterflies!) eat meat, with the intent of siccing them on humanity. Vincent is getting fairly good at his job by this point, though not perfect. At one point he calls the FBI or someone for help, only for them to call local law enforcement to look into it, and Vincent already knows that the local law enforcement is in on the plot. Still, that one mistake aside, he does well. He’s good at hiding. When the cops are trying to bring him in, he crashes the car and runs away on foot. He’s winged by a bullet. And in a climactic action hero moment, Vincent gets to punch an alien guy into the butterflies and they eat him. Not everybody gets to do that. The aliens abandon their carnivorous insect plot and use a comical explosion special effect to destroy all evidence they were ever there.

Things suck for Ellen here. The aliens paint her as a “hysterical” woman and a man she trusts turns out to be one of the Invaders and tries to kill her. It’s fairly bleak for her. Hopefully she and Ed have time to recover before the invasion gets to far.

Having mentioned the letter I wrote to the Walking Dead comic that didn’t get printed, I have opened things up so I can write about the letter I wrote to the GI Joe comic that, as far as I know, also did not get printed.

To try to figure out when in my life I wrote this letter, I looked at the covers of issues of GI Joe to see what was most familiar from my childhood. The winners are some Destro-focused ones that came out in 1991. That surprises me because in my memory the GI Joe letter was sent AFTER the one I sent to Blaze, but Blaze was three years later than than these Destro covers.

Still, it’s possible. 1991 is around when I was first getting into comics and GI Joe was a franchise I was familiar with thanks to the cartoons. I could have been drawn to it and misremembered that Blaze was actually later. And I remember the latest parts of my reading GI Joe before dropping off having the Eco-Warriors and searching for them tells me they were in comics in 1992. So I guess I have once again proved that memory is unreliable and I probably wrote this before the Blaze letter.

As for the content of the letter, I don’t remember most of it. Vague praise of the comic, I assume? An insistence that I loved the Joes and they were my favourites that would ultimately be proven untrue when I dropped it in favour of other things? More than likely. The only thing I remember for certain is that I asked that they would use Bazooka more often, because he looked like my father. And it’s true, my father was indeed a white man with a dark moustache. I suppose, if I was ten when I wrote this letter, as I have learned I must have been, I probably gave it to my parents to send and if my father saw that he may have withheld the letter and just told me it was sent. So we have three possibilities: 1) I sent the letter and it was not printed. 2) I sent the letter and it was printed and I’ve just never found out. 3) My father never actually sent the letter.

Ultimately, it doesn’t matter. Writing that letter was a part of my childhood, but GI Joe has simply not lived on in me as a nostalgic franchise. I like some of the designs of the characters and vehicle and stuff, but mostly I just don’t care. Even as an adult I sat down and read the first hundred issues of this comic, and while I could respect what Larry Hama did there, it felt like homework to me and I decided not to continue. It’d be funny to learn that if I had I’d find a letter written by me as a child.