There’s something about Jamie Hewlett and Alan Martin’s Tank Girl One and Tank Girl Two reprinted and remastered collection of the original strips that feels uncannily like a time capsule. Perhaps it’s because this is the first comic I have ever had to review that I’ve actually read long before reviewing. Or perhaps it’s because of the heavy associations to riot grrrl culture that the comic has seemed to accumulate over the years, a music culture that was a certain rite of passage for many of us who are now 20- and 30-something women. Either way, Tank Girl One and Tank Girl Two are a welcome retrospective that collects Martin and Hewlett’s strips, as well as some unpublished strips, interviews, and rare drawings, from 1988 until about 1992, for both old fans and newcomers alike.
In many ways, despite the fact that most of the strip’s stories are set in Australia, the two books serve as an encyclopedia of British and American culture in the late 1980s and early ’90s. As Martin and Hewlett point out in the introduction to Tank Girl One, they were always trying to incorporate bands and lyrics they liked into the strips. In fact, throughout the strip, you may encounter Tank Girl walking by a wall with Smiths’ lyrics plastered on it or sporting a button with They Might Be Giants or the Pastels written on it.
Later, in Tank Girl Two, references are made to the dawn of Brit-Pop and the Baggy scene in England, both musically and fashion-wise. Interestingly enough, Jamie Hewlett, illustrator and creator of Tank Girl, has since worked with one of the icons of that music scene, Damon Albarn of Blur, to form the cartoon band Gorillaz.
Beyond these references to musical culture, the collected strips in Tank Girl One and Tank Girl Two do a remarkable job of capturing the ethos of the late 1980s and into the early ’90s. Many of the strips embody the ideas or concepts most associated with post-modernism, which gained much of its popularity within the academy around the same time. Concepts such as the lack of a coherent narrative, kitsch, the refusal to distinguish high from low art, and self-reflexivity all figure into the panels portrayed in the two books in one way or another. Indeed, much of the first book is populated with almost incoherent strips, both in storyline and panel set-up.
Both Hewlett and Martin have often admitted in interviews that they weren’t much interested in creating plots that made sense and often made up the strips as they went. Self-reflexivity also occurs surprisingly often in both of the books. In a strip (as well as one of the issues) called “Force Ten to Ringarooma Bay” from Tank Girl Two, Hewlett and Martin write themselves into the strip (not an uncommon occurrence), only to lead them to have various arguments with the characters they have been drawing as to how the story should play out.
When Booga shows up unexpectedly, Jamie Hewlett questions how he appeared out of nowhere, only to have Booga respond, “This is comics! Anything can happen…” which is followed by a panel in which the characters address the reader by flipping them the bird. A general lack of concern for others, as well as an excess of violence, also characterizes both the strip and Tank Girl as a character. While not directly related to themes of post-modernity, the surfeit of violence in the strip is notable, as it seems to reflect the rise of violence in popular culture as a whole in the 1990’s, in particular the rise of gangster rap and 1994’s multi-award-winning film Pulp Fiction.
Along with musical references and tone, Tank Girl One and Tank Girl Two function as a sort of historical/political marker of the times. In the introduction to Tank Girl One, Alan Martin makes explicit that the desire to write and draw the Tank Girl strips was a response to what he, Jamie, and friends saw as a particularly bad slump in culture as a whole. They remember those years as a time “when Reagan and Thatcher were making life miserable for poor people”, as well as identifying the 1980s as a period when there had been “much barrel-scraping for art and culture.” Many of the strips make veiled references to the two aforementioned administrations and fire back at them with anti-establishment, anarchic attitudes (much like much of the alternative music being released concurrently with the strips).
While Tank Girl One and Tank Girl Two do not necessarily prove to be a revolution in the medium of comics, the drawing style is fun and irreverent, and the writing is amusing and, more often than not, quite snarky. It may also be true that Tank Girl seems somewhat dated in its abundance of references to the history and popular culture of the 1990s, but as nostalgia for that decade grows, so does the importance of such an artifact.
Tank Girl One and Tank Girl Two function as an almost complete historical compendium of the 1990’s without the need for supplementary articles. It’s all there: art, music, politics, fashion, and culture. Possibly unintentionally, Hewlett and Martin prove that comics have a unique way of serving as historical documents. We can no longer ignore the inherent power of the comics form’s ability to preserve and connect as a result of this discovery.