With only three issues published, and only five issues in the series, Clan Apis is nevertheless one of the best sigle-handedly produced comics available.  Its unlikely premise: to tell the biologically accuratestory of the life of a bee with enough wit and sweet graphics design to engage both grown-ups and children.

Writer-artist Jay Hosler begins with "Genesis" - according to bees - and travels the scientific road towards transformation and resurrection, all told with scientific accuracy, epic storytelling,superlative graphics and comic pacing, and told from the viewpoint of a worker bee giving the facts and myths of life to a larva.

A writer who cannot resist a pun, Hosler works wordplay and jest into his dialogue between the bees ("The hive has been eerily serene." "The calm before the swarm, eh?"). An artist able to blend magnifying-glass accurate depictions with cartoony moments, Hosler manages an amazing emotional range for his bees, positioning antennae and legs as if used to gesture like human hands, and by using "human" tilts of the bees' heads.  Hosler's layouts are as evocative as Sim's and his blacks and whites as lush as Smith's. His bees are as personable as Katherine Hepburn speaking to Whoopi Goldbeg.

An outstanding achievement blending scientific fact and comic book fantasy, Clan Apis is a book that deserves a place in every science classroom.

(c) V Mag