Honey West 1

MOONSTONE COMICS IN ‘NOT SHIT’ SHOCKER – FILM AT ELEVEN!

Even in the New Millennium, you can't go too far wrong with cat-fighting go-go dancers...

Since 1995, Moonstone Comics has had two distinguishing characteristics. Low quality, with plodding, obvious scripts and mediocre art; and poor value, with their books usually offering around 50% of the content indicated on the cover (sometimes as low as 33%), filling the rest with house ads and unwanted trailers for other series.

So along come Robbins and Martin, and they spit in the eye of a practice dating back to, oh,  the turn of the century, by producing a sparky, glossy thriller that’s engaging, eye-catching, and fills almost the entire comic!

Dames. They got no respect for tradition…

Honey West starred in a series of detective novels from 1957 to 1971, generally unsatisfactory mysteries which relied on ‘cheats’ for their solution. Honey herself was a bland character with little personality, but the relative sexual frankness of the books made them a modest success. In the wake of TV’s Avengers in 1965, Honey was retooled as a TV spy, updated and gimmicky, but again fell short of the mark; Anne Francis was charismatic and lovely, but was utterly unconvincing on the physical stuff.

Finally, though, we have a version that melds the noir sensibility of the novels with the off-beat charm of the TV show, and is a solid hit on the creative front.

The setting is the late sixties, and our ‘Private Eyeful’ is engaged by a topless pianist to investigate murder at her nightclub, necessitating Honey going undercover (admittedly not a lot of cover) as a go-go dancer at ‘The Purple Pussy’. Along the way, drug-dealers, inept TV actors, fashion designers, and an anti-war protest gone horribly awry complicate the situation, leading to a final-page murder set up (hopefully) for our heroine to resolve in issue 2.The story isn’t exactly deep, but it is lively, and this incarnation of Honey West already has more of a consistent ‘voice’ than either of the previous versions.

Cynthia Martin’s art is delightful; from her career as a bog-standard super-hero artist in the 80’s and 90’s, she’s taken a sabbatical and emerged as a stylised illustrator reminiscent of Dan DeCarlo and Jaime Hernandez, with a fresh and vivacious atmosphere that bubbles the narrative along. Kudos, also, to the effective colour palette used by Mark Simmons, which further evokes the setting and ambience.

It’s not the greatest comic ever, but it is an unpretentious treat, and I hope that not only are these standards kept up for future issues, but that there actually are future issues; given Moonstone’s dodgy rep and minor market presence, I suspect this is a title many retailers may well not have bothered with at all.

A pity, if so; Robbins and Martin’s hard work deserves a wider audience.
Even if they don’t have a clue how to put a traditional Moonstone comic together…