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Close readers of Willamette Week’s comics page are familiar with Auntie Beeswax, the titular character in the biweekly feature by cartoonist Bridgett Spicer. It is tempting to conflate Auntie Beeswax and Bridgett Spicer—but, it turns out, they are not at all the same person.
To wit: Bridgett Spicer has only two cats, Moxie and Molly, not the half-dozen or so that trail Auntie Beeswax. Spicer and Auntie Bee are both middle-aged ladies who wear glasses, but Spicer doesn’t keep bees or travel only by bike or have a stormy teenaged niece she cares for named Mallory. If all of this feels surprising and maybe a little disappointing, that’s a testament to how fully realized the fictitious Auntie Beeswax’s cartoon world is.
Fans of the Auntie Beeswax comic strip, which has run in the back of WW since 2021, can fully immerse themselves in her zany, crunchy corner of Portland—or as it’s called in the strip, Roseport—in Spicer’s new compilation book, Auntie Beeswax: Beehives and Cat Puke (Bridgett Spicer, 108 pages, $15). It may be raining, but Auntie Beeswax always finds the sunshine. (“Sometimes, you start your day with a relentless joy that you can’t explain,” she says in one panel.)
That level of optimism is aspirational, Spicer says.
“She is, in some ways, a drawing manifestation of all of the things I want to be in the world,” Spicer says. “The person who is always helping.”
Spicer is originally from Southern California and graduated with a degree in fine art from University of California, Santa Cruz. An exhibition of Bill Watterson’s Calvin and Hobbes comic strip proved formative for the young artist. The artwork on the walls included rough sketches and mistakes painted over with Wite-Out—not the full-color, crisp images she was used to seeing in the newspaper. Suddenly, Watterson’s work seemed more human and attainable. Spicer felt empowered to try to create her own strip.
Her first comic that really took off was Squid Row. Spicer envisioned the comic as the sitcom Friends meets the John Steinbeck novel Cannery Row meets the ’90s musical Rent. She submitted Squid Row widely for syndication.
“Rightly so, I was rejected many times,” she says. “My work was very rough at that time, as is anyone’s when they first start out.”
But the concept and characters stuck, and in 2010, the Monterey County Herald picked up Squid Row as a daily comic, including a full-color Sunday, for four years. She discontinued the strip a little after moving to Portland about a decade ago.
Once in the Rose City, a new character started percolating in her sketchbook, inspired by a couple of legendary older women in her family. Spicer’s grandmother Bea was a nurse who had cats and was known for taking such good care of her patients that she often brought home gifts from work. Spicer’s partner’s Aunt Bea was a florist who offered Spicer a margarita the first time they met; the aunt was 80 and “just a hoot.” Finally, the Margaret Rutherford character in the 1945 film Blithe Spirit is an eccentric medium named Madame Arcati who bikes to séances: “I’m thinking, that’s Auntie Bee,” Spicer says.
When Jack Kent, onetime WW art director and creator of the comic Sketchy People, asked if Spicer had a strip she’d like to contribute to the newspaper in 2021, she said yes first and started fleshing out Auntie Beeswax immediately afterward.
Kent thinks Spicer’s use of color is “amazing,” but it’s the character development—especially the relationship between Auntie and her niece Mallory—that keeps readers coming back.
“What makes Auntie Beeswax work is heart,” Kent says.
While creating Auntie Beeswax is not a full-time gig, Spicer is doing all the hustle herself for the book: self-publishing the compilation, promoting it, getting it into bookstores, and planning the book-release party Feb. 21 at Rose City Comics. While having Auntie Beeswax online is an opportunity to build a far-flung fan base, the pleasures of connecting with local readers—not to mention picking up a print copy and then being able to cut out the comics she likes—never gets old.
“I’ve cut out Too Much Coffee Man and Sketchy People and put them on my bulletin board at home,” Spicer says. “There’s something about that.”
GO: Auntie Beeswax: Beehives and Cat Puke book launch party at Rose City Comics, 3725 N Mississippi Ave., 503-282-5484, rosecitycomics.com. 1–3 pm Saturday, Feb. 21. Free.
