Sunday Splash Page #117

"I Hope You Got Your Mushroom Cloud In The Correct Size," in Cutey Honey a Go Go!, chapter 9, by Go Nagai (creator/original story), Shimpei Itoh (writer/artist), Hideaki Anno (planning cooperation)

This was a comic Shimpei Itoh started back in 2005, based on a live-action film adaptation of Go Nagai's original manga, but got canceled before it finished. Shimpei mentions in an afterword of the collection that he finished 10 chapters and it was meant to be done at 15, but there's no way that would have worked at the pace he was going, even if the book wasn't canceled. He got a little too interested in some of the side characters he came up with and lost the overarching plot. That includes a whole thing about a headmistress at a private school that has some deeply abusive and fucked up thing going with one of her students. That didn't really seem necessary or relevant to the story.

This is my only experience with that fictional universe, but I'm guessing the general outline is fairly accurate. Honey's a super-advanced android who possesses a special "system" that basically allows her to convert energy into anything she can conceive, if she knows what it is and has enough energy. In practice, that's mostly clothes (via one of those magical girl style costume changes), or a sword. But she also creates plate armor - with a boob window, defeating the point - a motorcycle, a fighter jet, and a fireman's outfit and hose.

She's fighting a secretive criminal group called Panther Claw, led by the lady up above, herself an android, with an vast army of devoted faceless goons and several stronger subordinates that are all extremely curvy and more than a little fetishy. The only other full-page splash in this thing was of one of them, called Scissors Panther, and there was no way I was posting that page. I would have skipped this book entirely first.

She's got backup from a gung-ho lady cop carrying more guns than the Punisher named Aki Natsuko, once Aki stops arresting Honey every time they meet (there's one scene where Aki opens fire on Honey and the person she's fighting, then tells them to freeze, and they both yell at her that she's got the order backwards). Plus a cocky goofball of a reporter who knows a lot more than he's letting. He reminds me of Lupin a little bit, in the way his attempts at charm alternate between cheesy and sleazy, and the way he's skilled enough to repeatedly avoid death while looking like a lucky klutz.

There's a pretty large body count, mostly cops and random civilians, but even when it's people getting their heads or limbs torn off, it's mostly bloodless. Guy takes a tomahawk to the head and it just sits there like his skull is made of mashed potatoes or something. Not necessarily a complaint, but my past experience with magna's been when there's a lot of dying, the creator like to throw the blood and gore around (Hellsing for example). This has a lot of humor in it, mostly in the contrast between grumpy, extremely serious Aki and, well, everyone else (Honey's naive, the reporter acts like a goof, none of Aki's subordinates are as gung-ho as her), but then it also has lots of people being slaughtered. Weird contrast.

That is it for the "C"s! Next week, and for roughly the next 14 months, we'll be in the "D"s! And no, it's not all because of Deadpool. He only accounts for one-sixth of the posts.