Furry Road: Tank Girl rolls on
For The Comics Journal a review of some seven-year-old Tank Girl comics that got reissued in a box by Titan in 2024. How many people are out there buying seven-year-old Tank Girl comics is a question, but the strip hasn't been much affected by that kind of gravity ever since writer Alan Martin brought it back from post-Hollywood deep freeze in 2007. (Not until now, anyway: a new hiatus might currently be underway.)
The standard chat is to say Martin and Jamie Hewlett's original 1980s Tank Girl spawned from Margaret Thatcher's macho if not cursed photocall lurching around Lower Saxony in a Challenger tank, and I’ve just repeated that anecdote in print; but the strip was a kick at the late 1980s as a mood as much as anything specific, a rectal thermometer dressed up as sweary bollocks big-boots comics. Since some of the ills it was responding to went away for a bit and have now come back, Martin's tending of his Tank Girl holy flame all this time might look like a decent artistic investment.
The other standard line is to call the strip punk and feminist, and well ok. Any creator-owned comic still going after 36 years has to have more going for it than just the sweary bollocks, and the spectrum of artists hired to illustrate it covers punks and modernists and romantics alike. I forgot that Mike McMahon drew a few issues in 2011 at his most aggressively uncompromising, pages less punk and more the Saw franchise remixed by The Young Ones. And sure Tank Girl is as feminist as the next strong female lunatic and female creators have drawn several variant covers, but none has so far had the run of a storyline. In any case Brett Parson draws these reissued stories, part of his stint as artist in residence from 2015 to 2020, in a style as slick and blithely crazed as Mad Magazine skiing straight off a ravine.
The guide-stars for Tank Girl predate the 1980s anyway, older British bonkers stuff like Roscoe Moscow in Sounds; plus most of Viz, already going a decade before Martin and Hewlett had a head of state soil himself in Tank Girl’s first story. That wise critic Amos Vogel reckoned that the sweet old slapstick comedians and the ferocious Dada artists were in exactly the same line of work, all kicking at a dull disappointing universe; and Tank Girl’s boots are landing on a similar spot.