Tank Girl Colour Classics does a good job of both explaining the titular character’s place in the underground comics world and how she grew to become a near-mainstream phenomenon in the 1990s. This volume collects every story and cover from the character’s debut through the end of her magazine days, and does well explaining how and why she became such a phenomenon, with only sparing outside interpretation or commentary.
Tank Girl Colour Classics Volumes 1, 2 and 3
Tracy Bailey (Colors); Sophie Dodgson (Colors); Jamie Hewlett (Cover and Art); Alan Martin (Writing and Design)
Titan Comics
2018, 2019 and 2020
Have you been waiting all your life to have all of Tank Girl’s best, brightest, loudest, and most outrageous adventures collected in softback volumes? Tank Girl Colour Classics revisits Tanky’s life from inception to the big screen, with occasional biographical snippets that let you know how Hewlett and Martin were coping with their creation’s fame. Made for those who love the character, or just want to capture her in a few convenient volumes, the book series isn’t terribly scholarly but still gives a punk’s eye view of her history.
For neophytes, Tank Girl follows our heroine, who’s busy surviving daily life in Australia’s outback. Her real name is Fonzie Rebecca Buckler, and she has an extremely strained relationship with both of her parents. She is many things throughout the comic’s run – a military member, a mercenary, a delivery girl, and an agent provocateur – and seems happily willing to take on any kind of job that will fatten her coffers. Unfortunately, she becomes an enemy of the Australian state after failing to deliver colostomy bags to President Hogan on the eve of an important trade meeting. With millions on her head, she spends her time dodging the authorities in her tricked-out tank.
Along for the ride are Booga, Tank Girl’s kangaroo lover; her friends, the (relatively) mild-mannered Jet Girl, tough-as-nails Sub Girl, and antic Barney. There’s also Camp Kola and Mr. Precocious, her sentient stuffed animals.
The ultimate “point” of Tank Girl is brashness and impoliteness, with a cheeky and wild sense of humor. For the 1990s, it was revolutionary to center the narrative of a comic around a girl who spits, swears, is crude and thinks for herself; who loves her friends and her lover, but also is independent. Tank Girl is by no means perfect — she creates disasters wherever she goes with impunity. She was pretty undeniably feminist in a very unique way from her first appearance on the page. Martin’s writing revels in both the satirical and the scatological, a spirit that carries Tank Girl onward to this day. The interesting story here related to Hewlett’s art, which slowly refined itself over time. He started out with thick, broad-stroked chaos and ended his run with the comic with more angular, round-edged cartoony sketches which would become familiar to fans of his later projects.
Tank Girl came to life in Deadline Magazine after Hewlett sketched what he describes as a “grotty-looking beefer of a girl brandishing an unfeasible firearm” back in college. The tank part of the equation came into play when Martin swiped a scan of a picture of a real tank and mounted it together with Hewlett’s sketch. New stories were published in Deadline from 1984 to 1995. In between, the character gained such a cult following that you couldn’t throw a punk into a pit at a Green Day concert without hitting someone in a Tank Girl t-shirt.
Hewlett and Martin eventually found themselves standing on a set in New Mexico watching their heroine sprout to life in the form of Lori Petty. The 1995 Tank Girl film was a bomb that both men expressed regret over but has gained cult status (this reviewer personally loves it); the soundtrack, featuring Bjork, Hole, and Joan Jett, was assembled by love and has also gained notoriety as a lynchpin among ‘90s alt albums. The title would go dormant while Hewlett co-created the virtual band Gorillaz. Martin eventually returned to the property, writing new adventures for Tank Girl which have generally been drawn by Brett Parson. While Parson doesn’t skimp on the gore or nudity, he has a slightly softer style than Hewlett, and sometimes the latter’s edge is missed from the property as the character marches on.
Tank Girl Colour Classics lays out the cultural cachet that Tank Girl carved out for herself over time. Going from a self-published idea by two college students to the subject of several Penguin Books anthologies in less than a decade is quite a daunting process, and the dizzying whirl of that time is captured here. But these brief interludes don’t make for a lot of new meat. What the book brings to the table is fresh color work by Tracy Bailey and Sophie Dodgson. They do a good job of accentuating Hewlett’s shadows and bringing the strip to further life with a blazing personality. There are yellows, oranges, and purples at the forefront here, and much red. The volumes are handsome and neatly designed and come with cover galleries.
For those looking for behind-the-scenes details, you’ll get previously unpublished drawings and see some new illustrations, including Hewlett and Martin’s illustrated representation of the fanmail they’ve been exposed to over the years. But if you just want all of the comics that Hewlett and Martin created together, a collection has already been published. If you own The Hole of Tank Girl, you’re good to go. But if you want a little more octane in your Tank Girl collection, these books have the right kind of firepower.
