The UK comic magazine Deadline blew a raspberry at Margaret Thatcher in 1988, and such is the power of art that her party immediately stayed in power for another nine years. But the raspberry still reverberates.
In 1986, Thatcher was photographed driving a Challenger tank in a notorious image pinned to many Leftist dartboards, the Glorious Leader fired up by victory in the Falklands War but twitchy about unpopularity, soon to try forcing homosexuality underground and bullying the media. Two years later the strip Tank Girl appeared in Deadline from writer Alan Martin and artist Jamie Hewlett, folding Thatcher's tank machismo back into a ribald, violent, sweary, kinky, absurdist, proto-third-wave-ish feminist anti-military pantomime, a flagrant, fragrant fuck-about manifesting several aspects of Britain's 1980s voyage into identity crisis, not least through being set in Australia.
Although born out of Margaret Thatcher and sister to other spasms of British absurdity under the mushroom cloud like the lavatorial comic magazine Viz, Tank Girl was conceived under the sign of Neighbours, the wildly popular imported Australian TV soap opera fixating the nation at the time with fresh leery ambivalence about Britain's sexy sunny ex-colonies.
Deadline printed a vast spectrum of comics – Shaky Kane's A-Men strip was driven into the magazine like a metal spike, the anode to Tank Girl's cathode – but time has washed most of them away. Tank Girl, though, has simply continued. True there was a decade's hiatus after the Tank Girl movie salted the ground beyond recovery, but with that out of the way Martin got IDW to publish Tank Girl: The Gifting in 2007, drawn by Ashley Wood, and kicking off a sequence of miniseries and one-shots that has wandered from publisher to publisher and never actually stopped. Tank Girl comics can by now be piled from floor to ceiling.
Many things in all these comics have been consistent. They are all written by Martin, and all are copyright Martin and Hewlett in the small print. (Since no one discusses Tank Girl, no one discusses its place as a 36-year creator-owned comics project either.) The strip is still notionally set in Australia although the location is a malleable all-purpose holodeck, with high-end Sydney lifestyle boutiques within artillery range of desert outposts and ramshackle lawless townships, all terrorized by a cartoonishly violent army.
Artists on Tank Girl form the Alan Martin Strolling Players, and the writer has curated his collaborators like a blissful comics fan wandering a con. Every artist has appeared to have a ball, and everyone has seemed a good fit while being wildly diverse, a neat trick. Getting Wood as the artist for the 2007 return was a bold move for a start, a switch from Hewlett's pugnacious horny brawlers straight to Wood's leggy, fluid, Bill Sienkiewicz-style distortions. That series' first issue was called "The Dogshit in Barney's Handbag," also a fair sign of the strip's intentions.
After that Rufus Dayglo was the house artist for a while, Jim Mahfood has chipped in, as did Mike McMahon in 2011 when no one on Earth was creating comics like his. But for the last few years Martin's most regular and most simpatico artist has been Brett Parson, with an art style that lays slick animation-style surfaces over Jack Davis caricatures and scads of balletic technicolor violence. Parson's tanks and jets and subs and jeeps charge across a Hanna-Barbera landscape, every wheel off the ground at the same time, the wackiest of races.
All of which is to say that if Tank Girl is your thing, then here's that thing you like. Titan has boxed three stories by Martin and Parson from 2016 and 2017 for this particular reissue – Two Girls One Tank, Gold and World War Tank Girl – a trio that in theory made up a continuing storyline, although the term is relative. The thread is the return of Sub Girl, one of Tank Girl's compadres from the Deadline days, killed off back in 1993 just to allow a throwaway Reservoir Dogs visual and forgotten about by Tank Girl even before the end of that episode. For Sub Girl the wilderness years have been a journey: amnesia, receipt of toxic male obsession, various levels of disrespect, and a period of fame starring in Golden Age cinema as Hollywood star Gloria Swanage (there is some time travel involved). As Tank Girl's found family unit is reformed again and sundered again, the story spins off the highway into side quests about Nazi gold, the deliberate infection of Tank Girl's hapless mutated kangaroo boyfriend Booga with an STD, and the gang's contribution to victory in World War II, all while fighting stark naked. Sub Girl is located in the strip as a serious character, a trauma survivor and recipient of unnecessary cruelty, and the story arc is a meta confessional about comics' disposable supporting casts. It mocks their superfluous nature while also loving them dearly. The box set is the loneliness of the long distance sidekick.
These stories are seven years old, and the Tank Girl roadshow has careened onwards since. More recently, in comics drawn by Parson and some others, Tank Girl has – among much else – murdered a school bully, taken acid, pulled a sword from a stone to become the rightful ruler of Britain, endured further traumatic encounters with her own past, and ended up asleep in a glass coffin like Snow White, where it almost seemed for a minute as if Martin was going to leave her. He did not.
Why should he? The planet is going back under the mushroom cloud as well as the waves. It feels like Tank Girl's times changed and then they changed back. So tear it all down, again. Subvert everything within reach all at once, take revenge against power, mock the absurdities, do that thing the Dadaists did but backwards and horny, crap on the cynical and the callous in willfully smutty havoc, blow that shit up. It won't change anything, but get it on the record.
The post The Tank Girl Trilogy appeared first on The Comics Journal.
Hello, my name is Jack Sparrow. I'm a 50 year old self-employed Pirate from the Caribbean.
No comments:
Post a Comment