Alright, boys and girls — lets all face a cold-hard truth: we should all love Tank Girl, and not all of us have actually read Tank Girl. This is a book as important to our sub-culture as Hellboy or Sin City, and yet it does not get nearly as much attention as it deserves.
Well, good news for you: the perfect book to give a damn about Tank Girl is in stores now, and I’ve purchased it and now I can’t recommend it enough. This, ladies and germs, is Tradewaiter: The Hole of Tank Girl.
Written by Alan Martin
Illustrated by Jamie HewlettBringing together all the classic Hewlett and Martin Tank Girl comics for the first time in this fantastic slipcased edition with additional materials including original art, unseen Hewlett pages, a “lost” original Tank Girl story, and the first new Hewlett Tank Girl artwork created in over 15 years. The core Tank Girl works have been lovingly restored for this major collection, spanning the whole era of classic Tank Girl. With Booga and the rest of the crew in tow, Tank Girl delights in the sort of marvellous mayhem that made us adore her the moment she stomped into our lives with her sexy boots and sassy mouth.
A wonderful collection that no comic book fan should be without.
352 pages / $99.99
So what is Tank Girl? Tank Girl is the story of a biker chick in a post-apocalyptic future who spreads mayhem and her own brand of chaos throughout the wasteland over a series of varying and often times hilarious acts. With a mix of drugs and random insanity, Tank Girl blasts across a Brit-infused punk scene set in the outbacks of Australia, while living in a tank (hence the name) with her mutant kangaroo boyfriend Booga. It’s inane, it’s oftentimes psychedelic, it’s a wild good time of a read due to it’s intensely absurd nature, and it as much a staple to the genre as most of the more popular creator-owned comics.
Why? Well, where other famous creator-owned books — both those I’ve previously mentioned and others — usually focus on a specific genre or area of comics to theoretically improve upon, Tank Girl’s focus was less specific. This wasn’t a book trying to reinvent a genre or any such thing, but rather a comic that would express the ideals of it’s creators, Jamie Hewlett and Alan Martin. This is the product of two men taking a DIY-attitude and bringing it to comes in full force, with Martin’s culturally evocative writing mixing with Hewlett’s blend of illustration and collages. Tank Girl has a “plot” and a focus only in the loosest of terms, as the story surrounding the heroine — beyond that she is a girl who lives in a tank — is often times second towards the nature in which the story is being told, from Burroughs-esque cut-ups and assorted surrealist tricks to a general disdain for any aspects of established authority, both within the context of the book and with a very clear metatextual anti-authority slant born out of their 1980’s British subculture and Margaret Thatcher’s rule.
Or, in a more concise terminology: Tank Girl is really about as punk as a comic book can get.
But we’re not really here to talk about Tank Girl so much as we are the collection. Now, sure: a giant Titan-published hardcover is about as far from a punk attitude as you could also get, and is a far flung from self-made and published zines, indie UK magazines or even publication under early Dark Horse. But here’s the catch — what you’ll find in The Hole of Tank Girl for the low, low price of $99.99 in the US, is all the Tank Girl you could ever want. The pun of the title aside, this really is the quintessential Tank Girl collection, with 7 years worth of Tank Girl comics, sketches, scribbles, scrabbles, notes, designs and assorted extras from Hewlett and Martin. Not taking into consideration everything that has been done with Tank Girl since, this is the original run from the creators up until the release of the 1995 film. And, speaking as someone who has always had an interest in Tank Girl based on the modern comics available, this is a damn fine purchase.
Continued belowSo, ok, the price is really pretty steep. There’s no getting around that. $100 for 350ish pages? If DC put out a trade of a New 52 title with roughly that many pages (about 18 issues), it’d be for roughly half the price. Yet, what you’re paying for feels relatively legit if you’re a fan of at least one of three things: fantastic art, behind-the-scenes extras or Tank Girl. That’s really all it takes; with an over-sized slipcased coffee table-esque book, you’re getting Hewlett’s pages all blown up on a grand scale, which really allows you to devour the artistic process that went into bringing Tank Girl to life (and watching Hewlett’s style evolve from the original Tank Girl stories to the pin-up on the cover is astonishing). If you’ve ever wanted even the tiniest glimpses of what brought Tank Girl to life, including a fascinating opening essay by Martin himself, then this book is for you.
And, hey. You like Tank Girl? Well, ’nuff said.
Suffice it to say, The Hole of Tank Girl is a pretty good deal of a comic if you’re into this sort of thing. The appeal is a bit specific to art-nerds and extra junkies, and I’m happy to call myself one. Heck, even if you’re just a big fan of the Gorillaz and enjoy all of Hewlett’s drawings of the characters, this is honestly worth a look. A super-sized book full of all the comics and extras that you could ever want in relation to Tank Girl, it’ll sit great on a shelf next to any Absolute collections you may have laying around.
