I’ve never read a Tank Girl comic before. I find that incredibly odd now, considering I’m such a fan of Jamie Hewlett’s art (via Gorillaz). Somehow, despite knowing he was the original artist of Tank Girl, I never made the natural/progressive jump to tracking down the Tank Girl comics. However, since being gifted a copy of the latest Tank Girl trade, entitled Skidmarks (hehe), am I singing a different tune?
Fine out my thoughts of my first ever experience with Tank Girl (outside of the thousand times Comedy Central used to play the movie).
To quickly answer the question of if I want to read more Tank Girl after this, the short answer is yes. The long answer goes more like this:
Holy moly is Tank Girl a ridiculous and fun comic book! Someone please hand me a late pass.
Having never read a Tank Girl comic book before, I was wondering if I’d be able to really just jump into the story. Is this an ongoing tale, one that requires several years of backstory to get? @#$* no! This is just @#$*ing Tank Girl, baby! You get to hop right in there, in the middle of the story, and it all makes perfect sense. Hell, I knew every characters name by the end of the second page. That’s just how easy it is to get acclaimed to the hilarious world that Tank Girl lives in. So if you’re holding off of reading Tank Girl because you’re afraid about fitting in, don’t worry. This is as easy to jump into by volume as books like Hellboy and Atomic Robo – except this is more ridiculous.
Skidmarks finds our eponymous heroine entering into a race in order to make cash fast. Why? Because her best friend Barney is in a skateboarding related coma, and the operation to get her better costs “more or less” the prize money of said race. So Tank Girl and her number one kangaroo mate Booga set out to beat everyone in their path, with the aid of Dee Dee from the Ramones (yes, that Ramones) and Jet Girl. What happens from there? Swears, 
boobs, explosions, weird elf things, talking brains, and a small heaping of existentialism – just to name a few.
Alan Martin has been writing the adventures of Tank Girl for quite some time now, so while I can’t really compare to what has come before, I can say with a lot of confidence that this series in particular hits plenty of strides. It is a weird comic, and one you don’t even have to pretend to take seriously, but it still does justice to the medium and entertains throughout. You’re really not going to find a lot of comics quite like this. The heroine is really anything but, the damsel in distress is barely a damsel in distress by the third act, and the villain is something I’d expect from a Warren Ellis comic like Nextwave. It’s quite an eclectic mix for one story, but it’s really just as good of an introduction to this world for me as any.
Meanwhile we have Rufus Dayglo on art duties. Dayglo, who I honestly could have sworn was Hewlett. I’ve seen the other artists that have worked on this book, but Dayglo has a very chameleonic style to his art that really draws me in. Being a big fan of Hewlett’s work and seeing Dayglo’s reflective style was really quite a treat for me as an incoming reader. Dayglo’s art was pitch perfect for what little I knew of the character and matched wonderfully with the writing put out by Martin. 
To sum it up, while I was certainly a newbie to the world of Tank Girl before, I am intrigued enough to now go on and be a much more avid fan. Tank Girl: Skidmarks is a very fun comic book with a surprising ending, and despite initial trepidation I found the experience rather rewarding. It’s not very often that I pick up a new comic book for the simple reason of “it’s fun,” but in this instance I’m glad I did.
