Review: Cutie Honey (Manga)

Honey Kisaragi is an android powered by the incredible Airborne Element Solidifier, which enables her to transform herself into a variety of identities. When her creator is murdered by the nefarious Panther Claw organization, Honey must do battle against them as the superheroic Cutie Honey in order to prevent them from gaining access to the Airborne Element Solidifier.

Cutie Honey was a two volume shōnen manga series created by Go Nagai originally published in 1973.

Cutie Honey is largely regarded within the manga and anime canon as a seminal, game-changing work that introduced the first magical girl to strictly male audiences. It’s an iconic series that has had many iterations and its lead character is perhaps one of the most well-known heroines from Japanese popular culture. That said, its original manga is utter garbage. It is a childishly written series that constantly undercuts its narrative in favour of scenes of exploitative nudity and gross-out gags. For example, almost every fight scene leads to Honey’s clothing being torn and each time she transforms into a new identity there are several panels featuring her posing nude. There are a few deplorable sequences that are rather uncomfortable to read. The first is when Honey transforms into a nude statue and is “comically” molested by two male characters, these same characters later continually interrupt her while she’s bathing in order to see her naked, and another near the end when Honey has trouble transforming and is without clothing for several pages. In this respect, Nagai takes every opportunity to objectify his protagonist and it undermines her chance at being an empowered heroine.

The biggest issue I had with Cutie Honey as a series was its blatant and often sickening level of homophobia. Honey is sent by her creator to an all-girls school in the mountains to keep her hidden away from the evil Panther Claw. It’s there that we learn the staff and students are all lesbians, due to the absence of men at the school. We see very little of the students, but much is made of the staff’s insatiable and often sadistic sexual appetites. One of the teachers routinely checks the dorms and will often torture misbehaving students, which means whipping them until their clothing is shredded. These women are monstrous in their appearances and behaviour, which implies that homosexuality itself is horrific and outrageous. There is one slight inconsistency with this perspective in that it’s possible to make the case for Honey herself being gay and that she has a relationship with her roommate Natsuko. There’s an affection and sweet playfulness to their interactions, which contrasts sharply against the more sensationalized portrayals of homosexuality. It does seem like Nagai is attempting to play within the themes and narratives present in Class S fiction, but he seems to fumble a bit with it since he de-emphasizes romance and emphasizes any and everything sexual.

Overall, Cutie Honey is a huge disappointment largely because it had the makings to be an absolutely riveting and complex series. The general narrative is quite fascinating – an android with the ability to transform into a variety of disguises must do battle against an all-female criminal organization – but is constantly undermined in favour of providing moments of levity by objectifying its heroine. In effect, the concept is great but the execution is awful. When read from a modern perspective, the series seems immature and is bogged down by really bad writing (and art).

RATING: D