Tank Girl
She drinks, farts, spits, shoots, snogs, and makes a good Christmas Pud. She's Tank Girl, and she's the love of my life. I first saw the Tank Girl movie when it came out in my freshman year of high school. Yeah, I know the movie sucked, but it was all I needed to realize that there was something else going on there. Thanks to the movie, they released collections of original Tank Girl comics. I remember the night I picked up the first collection. Reading through it, I was amazed. I had been reading mostly superhero comics before that, and although I was aware of the wide range of stuff out ther, I had no idea that comics could be.....well....like Tank Girl.
To put it bluntly, there is no story behind Tank Girl. It's not about plot and continuity, it's about an experience. Reading Tank Girl is like binge drinking. You have a blast while your doing it, but after it's done, you can't really remember what exactly happened. Although some of the earlier stories tried to set her up as a character with a job and a past, that quickly went to shit. There are no constants in the comic. The characters have no fixed home or occupation. Each story is a stand alone story, and you can read them in any order. There's nothing you "need to know" about the characters, their personalities are their strong point, and you'll get the jist of them in any and every story their in. The supporting cast in Tank Girl constists of Booga (her kangaroo boyfriend), Jet Girl, Sub Girl, Barney (the "fourth" girl), Stevie (an aborigine shaman), Camp Koala (who technically dead, but I still see him show up in stories), and to a lesser extent....Mr. Precocious and the Squeaky Toy Rat.
She's the creation of Alan Martin and Jamie Hewlett. The original Tank Girl strips ran in Deadline magazine. There used to be a Deadline site on AOL but it's been "closed for maitenance for about a year now. Alan's writing is superb, he's the master of the lose style. The writing brings the book almost to the point of vague, but not quite. And as for Jamie Hewlett......pure genius. His style is as broad as broad can be. Most recently he's been trying a more graphic "cartoon" approach, but anything he does is great. He is truly my favorite artist, but unfortunatly he hasn't been doing much lately...that I've seen anyway. I'm sure the both of them are up to something.
The real shame is that the Tank Girl books are getting harder to find. Here's a list of what you can find....
Tank Girl
Tank Girl 2
Tank Girl 3
**These three books are collections of her deadline stuff in color. The first two were released with the movie. The third one is extremely hard to find, but I got one at Amazon.com.uk.
Tank Girl: The Odyssey
-her DC/Vertigo debut. It's really good, art by Hewlett.
Tank Girl: Apocalypse (only available in comic form, thank god)
-this book sucks, it was pretty much what got her cancelled as far as Vertigo goes. Andy Pritchett did the art, and I don't even care who wrote this piece of shit. Sloppy in both art and writing, this is probably the worst example of Tank Girl I could show you.
Tank Girl: Movie Adaptation
-Oh god, don't even bother. Art by Pritchett
If you can find them, look for copies of Deadline and more recently Tank Girl magazines, both are now defunct but still good stuff.