While travelling home on Thursday evening last week I made a detour through London to “Forbidden Planet” - quite possibly the best cult book/movie/toy shop in the world.
I walked out with a rather famous comic book by Jamie Hewlett and Alan Martin - “Tank Girl”…
If you’re recognising the style of “Tank Girl”, well done - Jamie Hewlett went on to fame as the artist behind the “Gorillaz” band in the UK. There was a movie made of Tank Girl too in the late 90s starry Lori Petty, but it doesn’t hold a candle to the comic books.
Here’s what Wikipedia has to say about Tank Girl…
Tank Girl is a British comic character written by Alan Martin and originally drawn by Jamie Hewlett; currently drawn by Ashley Wood and Mike McMahon. As the name suggests, Tank Girl 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.
The comic’s style was heavily influenced by punk visual art, and later strips were deeply disorganized, anarchic, absurdist, and frequently psychedelic, featuring various elements of surrealist techniques, fanzines, collage, cut-up technique, stream of consciousness, and metafiction, with very little regard or interest for conventional plot or committed narrative. In fact, Martin described his attitude to plot in the third strip anthology as such:
“Never start with a clear idea of storyline. Instead, commence blindly, with a vague notion of trying to include a reference to your favourite band, gift shop, or chocolate bar.”
Strangely, I have never really been “into” the story within comic books - I love the artwork though. As a visual medium we all have memories of variously falling-apart comics in our childhood - usually either Disney, DC Comics, or Marvel. I remember waiting to get my hair cut at the local barbers and reading the adventures of Superman and Batman while waiting.
No doubt my copy of the first Tank Girl book will be worth something one day - but only to the stereotypical people who collect comic books though. I wasn’t surprised to find any number of them in Forbidden Planet.
The chap in front of me at the checkout was dressed in a smart tweed suit, mid 40s, obviously a batchelor, and had a wire pyramid balanced on his head. He insisted on volunteering to the shop assistant that he rather liked Manga comics because the eastern girls featured in them had a “certain something”. You could see people edging away from him.
“Step away from the scary man.”