TANK GIRL
Alan
Martin, Jamie Hewlett
Titan Books
The ‘80’s were awful, alright? Can we clear that up right now, please?
Britain was an oppressive, miserable place; we were still living under the mushroom-shaped cloud of potential nuclear destruction; and worst of all, the clothes were shit. I mean, sport coats with the sleeves rolled up? Blechh.
And if the clothes were bad, pop culture was worse – mealy-mouthed electronic pap, dark, depressing soap opera, Family Ties, and Rambo.
Comics, with typical obstinacy, were just getting good again; Alan Moore, Frank Miller et al. were showing people how it should be done, DC Comics was reinventing itself left, right and centre, and Marvel Comics was dressing its flagship hero in the height of xenomorphic fashion.
Meanwhile, here in oul’ Blighty, something strange was brewing…
Your humble reviewer, fresh from a hard day at school, wandered into the local branch of WH Smiths. Hopped up on Chewits and mad love for unattainable women, he scanned the shelves, looking for White Dwarf magazine, or perhaps even Dragon.
It was while I was looking for something to waste my pocket money on that I saw Deadline number 1. And, on the cover, Tank Girl.
Deadline looked like nothing else on the stands, with its mix of youth culture, music and comics. Alongside the napalm-flavoured future crime comedy Johnny Nemo, and the bittersweet Hugo Tate – and opening the issue – was Tank Girl.
Just in that first episode, Tank Girl blew half the Outback up, crashed through a barbeque – and most of the diners – chased a kangaroo, caught him, shagged him and shot him. In five pages.
Now, maybe I’d just been leading a sheltered life, but I don’t recall the Invisible Girl ever doing anything like that.
Jamie Hewlett, co-creator of the manufactured pop act Gorillaz, explodes onto the page with every manic idea his, and writer Alan Martin’s mind could come up with. The collected edition tells us that Tank Girl was a first-time effort, and it shows – in a good way, of course. There’s little sense of deliberation about the early strips. Instead, everything comes out in one enormous, semi-orgasmic burst. And it’s great. There’s so much to look at, from little messages to the reader, to the fantastic detail on the clothes and the machinery. You could spend hours pouring over the strips, and still find new things to see. I know I do.
That first instalment sealed the deal for me, but in reading the collected editions, I realise just how quickly Hewlett and Martin grew as creators. The early strips are Pulp Explosions, to be sure, but they manage to introduce some structure to Tank Girl as time moves on, telling great stories without losing that sense of speedfreakery that marked their earlier work.
Tank Girl herself is a wonderful, once-in-a-lifetime creation: oddly sexy, for a comics character (certainly sexier than any of the legion of bodystocking-wearing whitebread superwomen that came before her), powerful, and above all, free. Free to say and do some hilarious things. It’s probably this refreshing sense of freedom that was the key to her popularity.
Tank Girl stands the test of time as a unique piece of comics history. The flagship character of one of the most exciting and well-rounded comics magazines since 2000AD, Tank Girl also symbolised a turning point in my life: from the horrible, dark days of the 1980’s to the brighter, more exciting 1990’s, where everything was new again. Maybe it was just a puberty/coming of age thing, or maybe it’s just my nostalgia gland working overtime, but Tank Girl was everything the 1990’s – my 1990’s – was supposed to be. Young. Sexy. Free. Full of life, and the love of living it.
It’s nice to be able to revisit those halcyon days once in a while, don’t you think?
Review Text (C) Matthew Craig
Originally published in the pop culture magazine Robot Fist