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The Friday Review: Tank Girl
Writer: Alan Martin Lurking on the Warren Ellis Forum for so long, hearing about how readers wanted 'garage comics' that delivered a 'manic pop thrill', it was surprising how rarely TANK GIRL ever came into the conversation, for it's one of the best sources for both of those things in recent memory. If, like Steven Grant, you want comics to be drugs, Alan Martin and Jamie Hewlett's addled opus is the unrefined, uncut source you should turn to first. This is the story of Tank Girl, a young woman who smokes, drinks, swears, and shoots, and that's as good a summation as any of her character, motivations, and backstory all at once. Her world is a vaguely futuristic Australian Outback populated by both 'regular' people and humanoid kangaroo mutants. She's fond of heavy weaponry, as shown by her thrill in driving a large battle tank, and of her boyfriend Booga, one of the aforementioned kangaroos. The whole enterprise makes about as much sense as you'd expect from the desperate and sleep deprived; by their own admission, the creators tended to wait until the last moment before making everything up as they went, in a furious blitz of relentless creativity. But sense never seems to be a particular priority, and the looseness of the story and dialogue is a big part of the appeal. A good example is the two-part story 'The Australian Job', which resembles its apparent source material only insofar as Tank Girl makes a dogged effort to forge a plan while talking like Michael Caine. At least for two pages, anyway, after which it quickly falls apart into more heavily inebriated ultraviolence - and if that sounds like a warning rather than a recommendation, this could be the wrong book for you. In this story, as in most others, Martin and Hewlett were working too quickly to blink an eye at anything that appeared in the comic, and the result is that everything goes by so fast that the nonsense piles up and reaches critical mass before you have time to think about it too hard. Or at least it would if a lesser artist were drawing it. Jamie Hewlett, however, is working here at a level of density on every page that puts him in the company of artists like Geof Darrow, especially in some of the earlier stories: the third page of the first piece has him drawing not only every tattoo, necklace, and bit of stubble on all the miscreants in the foreground, but also a full character design for dozens of barely-visible figures in the rear. When combined with the copious amounts of dialogue and captions, as well as the scribbled marginalia here and there, the result is the neat paradox of a headlong joyride that's best appreciated with a slow, careful poring-over of the material. Later stories show Hewlett evolving into something closer to the pop artist he is today, with a focus more akin to Philip Bond's animation-like characters than Darrow's detail-obsessed sets. This settling down in art style comes at a time ideally suited for the one even vaguely thoughtful story in the book, which makes use of the Australian setting to present a story that draws on the aboriginal concept of the Dreamtime. When white settlers encroach on the tribal lands, the aborigines strike back by invoking "the spirit of youth and life and wisdom ... the spirit of Tanicha." While never seen in good light, Tanicha looks a lot like our heroine, and Tank Girl certainly fits the description. Everything taken together embodies "garage comics" in its ideal form. Certainly, it would be difficult to present the spirit of Tank Girl in a medium other than comics; Hewlett's art is central to the work, which rules out a prose adaptation - and the collaborators cram in so much into the breakneck storytelling that an animated adaptation would either have to lose the fun details that make it worth reading, or else move at a pace so ponderous that it wouldn't be TANK GIRL anymore. (Those who have seen the film, which tries to split the difference and fails rather badly, know what I mean here.) Beyond the quality and fun on every page of TANK GIRL, the best part may be the sense while reading this that anyone can do it. True, not everyone can match Martin's inspired sense of whimsy or Hewlett's talent at sequential storytelling, but everyone can sit in a locked room with an artist friend for 24 hours or so and at least produce something - and the more people who did that, the more good work would come out of it. If TANK GIRL does nothing else for you, at least let it instill "the spirit of youth and life" - wisdom optional. Nich Maragos is a San Francisco-based videogame journalist for 1UP.com. Ninth Art endorses the principle of Ideological Freeware. The author permits distribution of this article by private individuals, on condition that the author and source of the article are clearly shown, no charge is made, and the whole article is reproduced intact, including this notice. Back. |