Gun Honey–Sexy arms supplier is action anti-heroine in new stylish, international espionage crime noir series

Review by C.J. Bunce

You’ll want to check out the end of the first issue of Titan Comics and Hard Case Crime’s new series Gun Honey to learn how writer/creator Charles Ardai came up with the title. Gun Honey is a new comic book series about a woman who can get the weapons you want for the right price. The series is a mix of international locales a la James Bond, with the style movie audiences saw and heard in Guy Ritchie’s 2015 movie The Man from U.N.C.L.E.–you can almost hear the soundtrack. She’s the latest of a long line of anti-hero, badass femmes fatales in comics dating back to Miss Fury. And artist Ang Hor Kheng does the character and the genre justice, providing a sexy new character in a world of intrigue, duplicity, and the need for an alter ego.

Check out a preview of the first issue below, along with a preview of several of the series’ incredible cover variants from the likes of Bill Sienkiewicz, Robert McGinnis, Adam Hughes, Kendrick Lim, Jay Anacleto, Chris Wahl, Kendrick Lim, Ivan Tao, Warren Louw, Lesley Li, Fay Dalton, Andrea Camerini, and more.

Joanna Tan was just doing her job when she smuggled a gun onto a yacht, so a guy could break free. So what if he’s a big bad criminal–it’s the money that counts. But the U.S. government is onto Tan’s business, and now they want her to clean up the mess and do their dirty work. Her reputation precedes her, hence the moniker “Gun Honey.” Like some of the best, she also has a cat.

The series arrives on the heels of writer and illustrator Fernando Dagnino’s Smart Girl, and it’s interesting to see that Ang Hor Kheng’s style makes for a nice bookend to Dagnino’s new series, also conjuring the best action heroine work from the likes of some of your (and our) favorites: Mike Grell, Phil Noto, and Jackson Herbert. This will hopefully be the breakout series for the artist from Malaysia-he’s great at layouts, sexy women, action sequences, and cats. Issue #1 is a nice series opener for Kheng and the first graphic format book for Hard Case Crime creator and writer Ardai.

Check out our sneak preview of the first issue of Gun Honey: