Tank Girl
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Tank Girl was a 1990s English comic strip and the name of the leading character. Drawn by Jamie Hewlett and written by Alan Martin, later writing was done by Peter Milligan.
As the name suggests, Tank Girl drives a tank, which is also her home. She undertakes a series of missions for a nebulous organisation before making a serious mistake and being declared an outlaw; later strips were deeply disorganised and chaotic. Initially set in a stylised Australia (geographical knowledge is slight since she drives Tank from Australia to New Zealand), but most of the strips mine British pop culture and are mindless, hysterical, brilliant, infantile, abstruse and addictive. Real-life celebrities (usually B list, from Britpop bands and UK children's TV) shared the page with other major characters: Booga (a kangaroo and Tank Girl's boyfriend), the soft toys Camp Koala and Mr. Precocious, Stevie, Barney, Sub Girl and Jet Girl.
Tank Girl first appeared in Deadline's first issue (1988) and continued until the end of the magazine in 1995. The UK comic strips were also reprinted in an American publication, Tank Girl (published by Dark Horse Comics), beginning in 1991, with an extended break in 1992; the series ended after eight issues in September 1993. A UK magazine named Tank Girl was published in 1995, publishing a graphic-novel length story written by Peter Milligan loosely inspired by Homer's Odyssey, Joyce's Ulysses and a considerable quantity of junk TV. At the same time Tank Girl jumped the shark in a 1995 film directed by Rachel Talalay and starring Lori Petty which mistakenly attempted to give some serious(?) structural form its inspired madcap lunacy. The film was critically mauled and did extremely poorly, Deadline collapsed, and the character and the strip have not re-appeared since. Jamie Hewlett went on to make his fortune creating Gorillaz with Blur's Damon Albarn. Alan Martin lives in a caravan in Wales.
Tank Girl, as well as Sub and Jet Girl, are influenced heavily by the characters of Jaime Hernandez's Love and Rockets.
External links
- Template:Imdb title
- twisted.org (http://www.twisted.org.uk/tg/) (Fan site)
- Tank Girl History (http://www.artistsandmakers.com/dan/article.php?story=20030826103939347)