Tank Girl

For the film, see Tank Girl (film).

Tank Girl is a British comic created by Jamie Hewlett and Alan Martin. Originally drawn by Jamie Hewlett, it has also been drawn by Rufus Dayglo, Ashley Wood, and Mike McMahon.

The eponymous character Tank Girl drives a tank, which is also her home. She undertakes a series of missions for a nebulous organization before making a serious mistake and being declared an outlaw for her sexual inclinations and her substance abuse. The comic centres on her misadventures with her boyfriend, Booga, a mutant kangaroo. The comic's style was heavily influenced by punk visual art, and strips were frequently deeply disorganized, anarchic, absurdist, and psychedelic. The strip features various elements with origins in surrealist techniques, fanzines, collage, cut-up technique, stream of consciousness, and metafiction, with very little regard or interest for conventional plot or committed narrative.

The strip was initially set in a stylized post-apocalyptic Australia,[1] although it drew heavily from contemporary British pop culture.

Contents

Publication history

Martin and Hewlett first met in the mid-1980s in Worthing, when Martin was in a band with Philip Bond called the University Smalls. One of their tracks was a song called "Rocket Girl". They had started adding the suffix 'girl' to everything habitually after the release of the Supergirl movie, but "Rocket Girl" was a student at college who Bond had a crush on and apparently bore a striking resemblance to a Love and Rockets character. They began collaborating on a comic/fanzine called Atomtan, and while working on this, Jamie had drawn

“ a grotty looking beefer of a girl brandishing an unfeasible firearm. One of our friends was working on a project to design a pair of headphones and was basing his design on the type used by World War II tank driver. His studio in Worthing was littered with loads of photocopies of combat vehicles. Alan pinched one of the images and gave it to Jamie who then stuck it behind his grotty girl illustrations and then added a logo which read 'Tank Girl'.[2] ”

The image was published in the fanzine as a one-page ad (with a caption that read: "SHE'LL BREAK YOUR BACK AND YOUR BALLS!"), but the Tank Girl series first appeared in the debut issue of Deadline (1988),[3] a UK magazine intended as a forum for new comic talent, or as its publishers Brett Ewins and Tom Astor put it, "a forum for the wild, wacky and hitherto unpublishable," and it continued until the end of the magazine in 1995.

Tank Girl became quite popular in the politicized indie counterculture zeitgeist as a cartoon mirror of the growing empowerment of women in punk rock culture. Posters and t-shirts began springing up everywhere, including one especially made for the Clause 28 march against Margaret Thatcher's legislation. Clause 28 stated that a local authority "shall not intentionally promote homosexuality or publish material with the intention of promoting homosexuality" or "promote the teaching in any maintained school of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship." Deadline publisher Tom Astor said, "In London, there are even weekly lesbian gatherings called 'Tank Girl nights.'"[4]

With public interest growing, Penguin, the largest publishing company in Britain, bought the rights to collect the strips as a book, and before long, Tank Girl had been published in Spain, Italy, Germany, Scandinavia, Argentina, Brazil and Japan, with several United States publishers fighting over the license. Finally Dark Horse Comics won out, and the strips were reprinted in color beginning in '91, with an extended break in '92, and ending in September '93. A graphic novel-length story named Tank Girl: The Odyssey was also published in '95, written by Peter Milligan and loosely inspired by Homer's Odyssey, Joyce's Ulysses[5] and a considerable quantity of junk TV, (although Milligan asserts in the preface that the story is entirely based on real events, inspired by the wanderings and adventures of a group of lost friends, all of whom appear in the pages under various pseudonyms). Another graphic novel called Tank Girl: Apocalypse, in which TG becomes pregnant, also appeared in '96, written by Alan Grant after he spent several hours alone in the pitch-dark bowels of an actual tank, experiencing sensory deprivation. Apocalypse was drawn by Philip Bond. These last two stories, being graphic novels and not compilations of the strips, are distinctly more linear in nature.

Characters

  • Camp Koala: a stitchy, brown, gay, koala-shaped stuffed toy described as "the Jeremy Thorpe of comics", whom TG sodomizes with a hot banana. Camp Koala died tragically when they were playing baseball with live hand grenades which Camp eagerly caught in the outfield, exploding on impact, resulting in a violent, bloody, and gruesome death. After a tearless and comical funeral service, the other characters go to a toy store and buy a new one. Camp Koala is known for visiting occasionally as a guardian angel. He is the only character TG's ever admitted to loving.
  • Squeaky toy rat: a squeaky toy rat.
  • Mr. Precocious: a "small Shakespearean mutant" who looks a bit like a mini bipedal pink elephant, though may possibly be a bilby.

The future of Tank Girl

After the 1995 film, Hewlett went on to make his fortune creating Gorillaz with Blur's Damon Albarn. Gorillaz were a virtual band for which Hewlett reportedly received a "big money" offer from Dreamworks for the film rights. Hewlett declined, still soured from his previous Hollywood experience, and opted to wait until he could control things on the project himself.

Martin wandered around for a bit, staying at communes with hippie friends, looking for stone circles and ancient sites before settling in Berwick-upon-Tweed in the Scottish Borders with his wife Lou and son Rufus Bodie (named after Lewis Collins' character in The Professionals). Martin has played in various bands, written a Tank Girl "novel" (Armadillo) published in March 2008 by Titan Books, as well as various screenplays and scripts. He wrote the first new Tank Girl limited series in over ten years: Tank Girl: The Gifting with award-winning Australian artist Ashley Wood and Rufus Dayglo. Published by American publishers IDW, the first issue of which was released in June 2007. He has also produced Tank Girl: Carioca with Brit comics' legend Mike McMahon for Titan Books which was fist published in October 2011.

“ We went to the comics graveyard and dug her up. She's smelling pretty bad, but we're gonna put her in a wheelbarrow and parade her around for all to see, anyway. ”

Summer 2008 saw Tank Girl: Skidmarks appearing in all-new Nine-page episodes in the Judge Dredd Megazine, again written by Martin, with art duties taken on by Rufus Dayglo, who drew Visions of Booga for IDW Comics. In an interview Martin revealed that Visions of Booga was the only Tank Girl comic that doesn't contain any major swear words: "It has a "bastard" here and a "bitch" there, but it doesn't have any F-words or C-words."[6]

Titan Books have released The Cream of Tank Girl, compiled by Alan Martin, containing Jamie Hewlett art and Alan Martin scripts, starting from her earliest beginning as a pin-up in Atomtan, it features a brand new Hewlett cover as well as brand new script from Martin.

Comic books

Tank Girl - By Hewlett & Martin. Released in 1990 by Penguin Books, collected the first 18 episodes from Deadline Magazine.

Tank Girl 2 - By Hewlett & Martin. Released in 1993 by Penguin Books, collected 20 episodes of the Tank Girl story.

Tank Girl 3 by Hewlett & Martin was published by Penguin in 1996. It collected the final stories from Deadline Magazine.

When the Tank Girl movie was being made, a deal was struck with DC's imprint Vertigo Comics to release three Tank Girl mini-series. The first two were released throughout June 1995 - February 1996. The third mini-series was never created.

In 2007, Tank Girl returned with new mini-series and one-shots.

Collected editions

Tank Girl has been collected into a number of trade paperbacks over the years. The entire back catalogue was reprinted by Titan books in 2002 and these books were "re-mastered" in anniversary editions, stripped of their subsequently-added computer colouring and line work repaired.

Film

Main article: Tank Girl (film)

The comic was also adapted into a critically and financially unsuccessful film, albeit with a considerable cult following. The film featured Lori Petty as Tank Girl and Naomi Watts as Jet Girl.

Martin and Hewlett are known for speaking poorly of the experience, with Martin calling it "a bit of a sore point" for them.[7] Despite its critics, the film did however undeniably broaden the comics' fanbase from a relatively modest cult following to an international audience.

See also

Notes

  1. ^ Tank Girl History
  2. ^ Alan Martin interview
  3. ^ Whelehan, Imelda; Sonnet, Esther (1997), "Regendered Reading: Tank Girl and Postmodernist Intertextuality", in Cartmell, Deborah, Trash Aesthetics, Sydney: Pluto Press, p. 31, ISBN 0745312020. 
  4. ^ Wired 2.12: Tank Girl Stomps Hollywood
  5. ^ nalysis of the parallels between Tank Girl: The Odyssey and Homer and Joyce's works
  6. ^ "Alan Martin: Tank Girl Resurrected". SuicideGirls.com. 24 October 2008. http://suicidegirls.com/interviews/Alan+Martin%3A+Tank+Girl+Resurrected/. Retrieved 2008-10-24. 
  7. ^ http://www.sci-fi-online.com/Interview/02-11-22_AlanMartin.htm

References

External links

Interviews