Tank Girl is a British comic book character created by Alan Martin and Jamie Hewlett. It first appeared in print in 1988 in the British comics magazine Deadline, and then in the solo comic book series Tank Girl. After a period of intense popularity in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Tank Girl inspired a 1995 feature film. After a long hiatus, the character returned to comics in 2007 and has appeared regularly in the years since. Originally written by Martin and drawn by Hewlett, the character has also been drawn by Philip Bond, Glyn Dillon, Ashley Wood, Warwick Johnson-Cadwell, Jim Mahfood, Brett Parson, Jonathan Edwards, Craig Knowles, Rufus Dayglo, Andy Pritchett, and Mike McMahon. Tank Girl (Rebecca Buck – later revealed to have been born as Fonzie Rebecca Buckler) drives a tank, which is also her home. She undertakes a series of missions for a nebulous organization before making a serious mistake and being declared an outlaw for her sexual inclinations and her substance abuse. The comic centres on her misadventures with her boyfriend, Booga, a mutant kangaroo. The comic's irreverent style is heavily influenced by punk visual art, and strips are frequently deeply disorganized, anarchic, absurdist, and psychedelic. The strip features various elements with origins in surrealist techniques, fanzines, collage, cut-up technique, stream of consciousness, and metafiction, with very little regard or interest for conventional plot or committed narrative. The strip was initially set in a post-apocalyptic (rendered self-fending due to an implied nuclear armageddon) Australia, although it drew heavily from contemporary British pop culture.

Publication history

Martin and Hewlett first met in the mid-1980s in Worthing, while studying at The West Sussex College of Art and Design (WSCD, later renamed Northbrook College). Martin was in the college band The University Smalls with fellow comics enthusiast Philip Bond. One of their songs was called "Rocket Girl". They had started adding the suffix 'girl' to everything habitually after the release of the Supergirl movie, but "Rocket Girl" was a student at college on whom Bond had a crush and who apparently bore a striking resemblance to a Love and Rockets character. Martin and Hewlett began collaborating on a comic/fanzine called Atomtan, and while working on this, Hewlett had drawn: The image was published in the fanzine as a one-page ad, but the Tank Girl series first appeared in the debut issue of Deadline (1988), a UK magazine intended as a forum for new comic talent, and it continued until the end of the magazine in 1995. Tank Girl became quite popular in the politicized indie counterculture zeitgeist as a cartoon mirror of the growing empowerment of women in punk rock culture. Posters, shirts, and underpants began springing up everywhere, including one especially made for the Clause 28 march against Margaret Thatcher's legislation. Clause 28 stated that a local authority "shall not intentionally promote homosexuality or publish material with the intention of promoting homosexuality" or "promote the teaching in any maintained school of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship." Deadline publisher Tom Astor said, "In London, there are even weekly lesbian gatherings called 'Tank Girl nights.'" With public interest growing, Penguin, the largest publishing company in Britain, bought the rights to collect the strips as a book, and before long, Tank Girl had been published in Spain, Italy, Germany, Scandinavia, Argentina, Brazil and Japan, with several United States publishers fighting over the licence. Finally Dark Horse Comics won, and the strips were reprinted beginning in 1991, with an extended break in '92, and ending in September '93. A graphic novel-length story named Tank Girl: The Odyssey was also published in 1995 (released in four issues by Vertigo Comics), written by Peter Milligan and loosely inspired by Homer's Odyssey, Joyce's Ulysses, and a considerable quantity of junk TV. This was followed by another four issue series, Tank Girl: Apocalypse, written by Alan Grant and published by Vertigo from November 1995 to February 1996.

After 1996

After the 1995 film, Hewlett went on to create the band Gorillaz with Blur's Damon Albarn. Martin has also played in various bands, and written various screenplays and scripts. After a long publishing hiatus, the character returned in 2007 in Tank Girl: The Gifting, a four-issue limited series written by Martin and illustrated by Australian artist Ashley Wood, which was published by IDW Publishing. This was the first new Tank Girl comic material since the final two issues of the four issue series Tank Girl: Apocalypse in 1996. The four-issue limited series Tank Girl: Visions of Booga, by Martin and artist Rufus Dayglo, was released in 2008 by IDW, as was Tank Girl: Armadillo and a Bushel of Other Stories, a Tank Girl novel authored by Martin and published by Titan Books. Since then, Tank Girl has appeared on a regular basis in various one-shots and limited series, published by IDW, Image Comics, and Titan Comics. The regular creative team is Alan Martin and Brett Parson. Titan Books released The Hole of Tank Girl on 28 September 2012, which encompasses the original Hewlett and Martin material, as well as additional content. The three-issue limited series 21st Century Tank Girl debuted on 10 June 2015. Martin and artist Warwick Johnson-Cadwell have also created a kid-friendly spin-off called Young Tank Girl, published in the digital anthology Moose Kid Comics. In 2019, Titan Comics debuted Tank Girl, publicized as Tank Girl's first ongoing series, with an indicia listing the book as Tank Girl Ongoing. From January to May 2019, the first four issues were cover-titled Tank Girl: Action Alley, and from July to December 2019, the next four issues were cover-titled Tank Girl Forever.

Characters

Collected editions

Tank Girl has been collected into a number of trade paperbacks over the years. The entire back catalogue was reprinted by Titan Books in 2002 and these books were "re-mastered" in anniversary editions, stripped of their subsequently-added computer colouring and line work repaired. In 2018 the entire Hewlett and Martin back catalogue was once again reprinted under the "Tank Girl Colour Classics" banner, this time as collectible hardbacks, with all-new colouring and extra material.

Film

The comic was also adapted into a critically and financially unsuccessful film, albeit with a small cult following. The film featured Lori Petty as Tank Girl and Naomi Watts as Jet Girl. Martin and Hewlett are known for speaking poorly of the experience, with Martin calling it "a bit of a sore point" for them. In September 2019, a Tank Girl reboot movie was reported to be in development with Margot Robbie's production company LuckyChap Entertainment optioned rights from MGM, Robbie co-produce with her partners Tom Ackerley and Josey McNamara, Mallory Westfall writing and Miles Joris-Peyrafitte directing.