It feels a bit strange to open this article talking about something completely different, but, hey, it makes a point. Having front row seats to strong opinions in the Tomb Raider fandom, you encounter a faction that yearns for the Lara Croft of yesteryear – back when the adventurer was solely about “playing for sport,” largely free of emotional hang ups, and treated to cleavage-centric, pinup style comic covers by the likes of Adam Hughes.
If that’s what you want from your fictional heroines now, let me direct you immediately to comic series Heat Seeker, a spin-off from smash indie hit Gun Honey. From writer Charles Ardai and artist Ace Continuado, Heat Seeker is fantastically fun, twist-filled and sexy, delivering an action-packed pulp adventure that is considerably breezier than the pulp noir tale that spawned it. For the record, Heat Seeker was born out of a drive to fill the publishing gap while artist Ang Hor Kheng draws the popular Gun Honey books.
Back to the Lara Croft comparison, while the iconic archaeologist finds things, Heat Seeker’s protagonist Dahlia Racers hides them. A master of illusion and disguise (hell, she’s not even a redhead), not to mention an accomplished gymnast and strategist, thrill-seeking Dahlia is the best at what she does – helping people vanish through whatever means necessary.
In Heat Seeker Volume 1, that was the Gun Honey herself, weapons smuggler Joanna Tan (who also just so happens to be an ex of Dahlia’s), on the run from a US government agency. In Volume 2, which kicks off today in the form of Issue 1 for Heat Seeker: Combustion – A Gun Honey Series, Dahlia is enlisted to shepherd a scientist’s young daughter to safety. Complicating matters is the threat of a deadly biological weapon, and a beautiful mercenary who feels no pain or fatigue.
At this point, I have to say that if you’re put off by the heavily sexualised covers for Heat Seeker, don’t be. There’s a surprising amount of gender equality in the series, including in regards to the nudity on display. Dahlia herself is peak positive representation: an assertive, unapologetic lesbian in charge of her own destiny, who includes other queer characters within her circle of trust. Heat Seeker is good, escapist stuff with more meat on the bones than you’d think at first glance. And a tasteful approach to its raunchier moments.
Now, on the release day of Heat Seeker: Combustion #1, we chat to the comic series creator, award-winning writer and Hard Case Crime co-founder Charles Ardai about the surprise, breakout success of the Gun Honey franchise; writing for comics vs. novels; the books’ matter-of-fact approach to LGBT+ themes; and more.
Noelle (Pfangirl.com): Firstly, did you ever expect the reception that Gun Honey, as a whole overarching franchise, has received?
Charles Ardai: Never! I had a great time writing the first Gun Honey series, it was a story I was excited to tell, but at that point we’d published two dozen other comics and graphic novels including ones by luminaries such as Walter Hill and an adaptation of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, and I never expected Gun Honey to become not only our best-selling comic of all time but the top-selling indie comic of the year for the whole industry. But it did. Since then it has spawned three sequels, with a fourth debuting this week, and I am working on scripts for two more for next year. There’s even a Gun Honey TV series in development! I never expected any of that, and I have to say it feels pretty terrific.
What can people expect of Heat Seeker: Combustion? From Issue 1, Dahlia seems in quite different territory (literally!) to Volume 1, and structurally things are a bit different too. Is it fair to say Dahlia isn’t three steps ahead this time, like she often was in Vol. 1?
Charles Ardai: Yes, that’s fair. Dahlia is an excellent chess player and out-thinks most opponents, but here her client is a Nobel Prize-calibre biochemist, and he’s no slouch in the out-thinking department. He hires Dahlia to help his 12-year-old daughter disappear, supposedly so she can’t be used as leverage against him, but there may be things he’s not telling Dahlia. I thought it would be fun to put her at a disadvantage, so that we can believe she’s really in danger and needs to think on her feet. As for the literal territory, who wouldn’t enjoy a wintertime visit to Venice and the ski slopes and saunas of the Dolomite Alps?
Gun Honey and Heat Seeker are quite different creations. You’ve spoken about the lead characters Joanna and Dahlia being equivalent to Christian Bale and Tom Cruise, which is a fantastic way to sum up the tonal differences between the two series. What are your influences in writing Heat Seeker specifically?
Charles Ardai: Joanna Tan, the lead of Gun Honey, was orphaned as a teenager, forced to flee her home and her country and create a new life for herself in the American underworld – that’s a pretty dark story, and it’s not a surprise that she’s a darker character.
Dahlia Racers, the lead of Heat Seeker, had a perfectly normal, happy childhood and found her way to her line of work because she loves the thrill of it, the excitement and danger and the satisfaction of pulling off the impossible, especially when the stakes are life and death. But Dahlia isn’t a killer – in the end, when she takes on a client, it results in someone not dying who otherwise might. Joanna only occasionally pulls the trigger herself, but every time she agrees to smuggle a weapon to one of her clients, she knows someone is almost certainly going to wind up dead.
To put it in James Bond terms, Joanna’s more the Daniel Craig version and Dahlia is more like Roger Moore; or to rope in some other franchises, Gun Honey is a bit more Jason Bourne, Heat Seeker is a bit more Mission: Impossible.
What’s it been like making the shift from novels and short stories to comics? Is there a part of the comic-creating process you really enjoy, and conversely, what’s been the biggest challenge?
Charles Ardai: Prose fiction can be as long or as short as you want, can take any form you want – you have infinite freedom as an author. You can be terse as Hemingway or florid as Lovecraft, you can describe the physical world or live entirely in your characters’ minds and perceptions. But what you can’t do, not literally, is show the reader what anything actually looks like. The finest prose in the world can’t give you the visceral instant effect of seeing your heroine topple from a moving ski lift and dangle over a precipice by one hand while bullets speed by her just inches away.
I love describing a scene like that to an insanely talented artist and then seeing it come to life on the page. I couldn’t draw if you put a gun to my head, and I love being part of a collaboration where my ideas get brought to life visually by people who have talents I just don’t possess and never will.
On the other hand, comics are very constrained in other ways: each issue has exactly 22 pages, not a page more or fewer, and each issue has to end on a cliffhanger; each page can only have so many panels, and each panel can only fit so many words of text; if you want a visual to be a revelation to the reader, it has to appear on a left-hand page, so that it’s a surprise when the page gets turned; and so on. I’ve compared it to writing formal poetry – a sonnet with precisely 14 lines and a particular rhyme scheme and line length, or a haiku with a set syllable count. Working within those constraints can be a fun challenge, but it’s definitely a challenge!
On that note, why transition from working with words only to comics?
Charles Ardai: You reach a different audience, readers who might never discover your work if it remained words-only. And you get to tell different sorts of stories. That episodic, serialized, action-packed sort of pulp storytelling is what comics do best, better even than movies, and I love getting to work different muscles by writing in different media.
As a queer woman, I really appreciate that main character Dahlia is a lesbian, and it’s treated so matter of factly. How did that choice come about? Was it a nod to pulp tradition where gay women have had a long presence, or was there more driving it? I bring that up because Heat Seeker is notable for its number of queer characters and the way that disguises constantly play with gender, again in a judgement-free manner.
Charles Ardai: It’s funny that people ask how you made the choice if you make a character gay, but not if you make a character straight, even though that’s just as much of a choice! My characters tend spring to life in my mind with certain attributes already in place: tall rather than short, brash rather than timid. And when Dahlia sprang to life for me, she was a lesbian and that was that. She’s not conflicted about it, she’s not struggling with it, it’s just who she is.
Of course, once I had that character in mind, the analytical part of my brain inevitably started thinking about the opportunity it offers to play with the spy-movie trope of the rugged male hero with a woman in every port – let’s see how that plays out when it’s a rugged female hero with just as active and unapologetic a sex drive.
And yes, there’s a long tradition of queer women in pulp fiction, which I’m proud to tip my hat to. But if I really think about where that aspect of the character came from, it’s more just that I’ve lived all my life in New York City and probably half the women I know are queer. My sister-in-law and her wife are queer. It’s not something exotic or strange. It’s just life.
I will note that Cesar, Dahlia’s occasional helper in her criminal activities, is gay too, and a big part of the first storyline is about the importance of “chosen family” as opposed to the biological sort – Dahlia is fond of her father and sister, but they’re not central to her life the way her queer family is. I’ll also note that the play with gender continues in this second storyline even more than the first. Boys become girls and vice versa, and sometimes that transformation is the thing that saves their life. It’s not meant as a parable – it’s just the way my action-adventure storyline naturally unfolded – but if some grad student somewhere decided to write a thesis about it, I couldn’t pretend it’s not there to be unpacked.
I know what I would say, but how would you promote Gun Honey and Heat Seeker to anyone who goes, “Oh, it just looks like sexy objectified women; it’s not for me”?
Charles Ardai: I’m really curious what you would say! My answer is that context matters, and point of view. Comics have always presented idealized physiques, female and male – skintight superhero costumes are basically anatomy studies — but historically it was always in the service of a very straight, rather conservative storytelling agenda: Superman had Lois Lane, Mr. Fantastic was married to the Invisible Woman.
In my comics, I put the tools of the comic medium to work to tell different sorts of stories, ones that I hope will appeal to a broader set of readers. The women are still beautiful (everyone’s beautiful in comics), but they’re also independent and strong and make good or bad decisions for themselves and triumph (if they do) by their own wits and abilities.
As for the visuals, what exactly is wrong with beauty? No one comes to a visual medium hoping to see something they find unattractive; beautiful settings and beautiful people are part of the appeal of any good thriller, whether it’s at the movies or in a comic. And if some male comic readers get drawn in by the sight of a sexy woman and stick around to read the gender-bending, female-forward story, who knows how their perspective might get broadened…?
Are there any plans to further expand the Gun Honey universe? (I personally would never say no to more of Heat Seeker’s Sarah Claride). Or, are you happy to continue with a focus on Joanna and Dahlia’s adventures?
Charles Ardai: There are: I would personally love to see Sarah Claride come back (she’s one of my favourite characters), and in Heat Seeker: Combustion you’ll meet a new character, a mercenary who’s been genetically altered so she can’t feel heat, cold, fatigue, hunger or pain – if she manages to survive this series (I make no promises!), I think she might just need to get her own book.
One of the things that’s fun about her is that she’s not just a professional soldier, she’s also a total geek, a comic book fan herself, who chose to become an experimental test subject with Steve Rogers in mind. Sometimes a character just grabs you by the throat and insists to be written more about, and this unusual young woman does seem to have my writerly trachea in her iron grip.
Heat Seeker: Combustion – A Gun Honey Series #1 (of 4) is on sale from today, 13 November, published by Titan Comics imprint Hard Case Crime. Get it in print or digital.
Volume 1 of Heat Seeker can be found here, while Gun Honey: Collision Course, the third volume of the franchise’s foundation series, releases on 14 January 2025.