Comic Review: Tank Girl (vol. 1) By Hewlett and Martin

Title- Tank Girl (vol. 1)

Author(s)- Hewlett and Martin 

Genre- Comic - Adventure, Comic - Humor, Comic - Dystopia 

Tank Girl is hard to describe. She is utterly insane and lives in a post-apocalyptic world consisting of talking kangaroos, villains, and yes, her giant tank. The good thing about Tank Girl is, number one, she doesn’t care what people think. Number two she is fearless. Number three? Well, her fashion sense in amazing. The back describes Tank Girl as “an ignorant, beer-swilling, bestial skinhead [who becomes] an ignorant, beer-swilling, bestial blonde in a tank.” What’s more to love? 

Volume 1 of Tank Girl encompasses 15 issues ranging from October 1988 to February 1990. The comics are utterly, but purposefully, non Sequitur and it’s beautiful. I read through many panels thinking, “I don’t know what is going on but I love it.”

A woman like tank girl naturally has a lot of enemies. Or makes enemies along the way. Besides Booga, a trusted Kangaroo companion. Things don’t always come out the way Tank Girl plans, but she always comes out the insane victor at the end. It’s hard to defeat a woman who is, as I said, utterly insane and possesses a tank.

There are some really good features to the anthology. I particularly liked the cut out Tank Girl paper doll. It comes complete with uni-cycle and flask of coffee. The end also features a few pages of the original color covers of a few issues. I love it when anthologies include the covers—it gives a greater sense of what the comic looked like when it came out and it feels you are truly reading the comics as pieces and not as one whole massive storyline.