YEAR 1965: HONEY WEST

While the Honey West novels are just tolerable time-killers, the short-lived 1965-66 teleseries remains a big step forward for shows featuring female protagonists. While this version of Honey was given a tough male companion in the form of Sam Bolt, he never hogged all the action as did the male companions of female serial-heroines like Nyoka. In all thirty episodes of the one-season series, Honey was invariably seen battling both male and female opponents with her masterful judo skills.
The scripts were light entertainment, but for all that much sprightlier than the BURKE'S LAW series on which ABC's version of the lady detective made her debut, as noted in detail here.

Perhaps the wittiest episode of the series was one entitled "The Fun-Fun Killer," in which Honey faced off against a bulletproof killer robot. And while to be sure, this robot turned out to be a human making a mechanical masquerade, I think it likely that the episode's scripters just might have remembered actress Anne Francis' prior encounter with a far more famous-- and genuine-- mechanical man.

YEAR 1957: HONEY WEST

As of this writing I've only read three of the eleven novels starring Honey West, one of the best-known female detectives of the 20th century, though her fame may derive from the one-season 1965-66 teleseries, featuring a very different version of the character.

The first three novels, collected as THE HONEY WEST FILES vol. 1, are breezy entertainments clearly aimed, despite their feminine star, at a male audience. Most of the writing by pseudonymous author "G.G. Fickling" was by one Forrest Fickling, though he got some collaborative aid from his wife Gloria. The titular Honey, like many heroes of both genders, gets into her dangerous business because her father is killed by criminals.  She has no regular assistants, in contrast to the teleseries, but if the rest of the novels are like these three, readers weren't regularly picking up copies to see Honey trounce thugs with judo tosses. There are a few such scenes here and there, but-- in keeping with the target audience-- there are a lot more scenes in which Honey finds herself ogled and/or groped by a half-dozen males of varying quality in each story.  Her character pretty much accepts this as the way of the world, but she does have a knack for the basic putdown and defends herself as well with words as with judo.

All that said, Honey does have brains as well as beauty, and she does solve her cases with some decent if far from exceptional detective-work.  This might go toward explaining the less frequent use of violence; in contrast to the novels of Mickey Spillane, the Honey West stories are pretty firmly in the groove of the ratiocinative detective tale.

BEST FEMALE/MALE FIGHTS IN COMICS: 38

The Nostalgia Train now takes me from the 40's to the '60s for one last look at the Silver Age, albeit at a character better known from prose and TV than from her few comics-appearances.

Perhaps appropriately for a one-season wonder, the TV show HONEY WEST-- which featured Anne Francis as a private detective who used karate to chop her way out of tight spots-- spawned but one issue from Gold Key Comics. Of course, Gold Key tended to bring out a lot of single-issue comic books, whether they were original concepts (like JET DREAM and TIGER GIRL from posts 8 and 9) or other TV-adaptations. Gold Key also brought out one single issue of THE AVENGERS, which not only ran longer than HONEY WEST but also had considerably more impact on American culture, thanks to the wittiness of the show's scripts and the charms of Diana Rigg. Speaking as a fan of the then-current show, Gold Key's AVENGERS was a witless, charmless disappointment.

Gold Key's HONEY WEST comes off considerably better, thanks to the art of Jack Sparling (also seen in TIGER GIRL). All the stories have the lady dick doing her karate thing, but the best one is probably the lead tale, titled, "All the Tough Guys Fall for Honey." This a joke, because, see, the action takes place aboard a ship, and when Honey shimmies up a mast, and the crooks go after her, she chops them and they "fall for her." Yuk, yuk-- but at least the art's nice.