Tanked

Tank Girl is a rip-snorting, bald, badass beeyotch who rides around in a mini-tank across the vaguely post-apocalyptic, Mad Max Aussie outback, having surrealistic and hyperviolent adventures while being dirty, messy, foul-mouthed, and very drunk. Wielding serrated knives, huge guns, convenient small artillery, and tits that explode into missiles, she chain-smokes over a crooked little grin, leaning hard into her exuberant comic-book stupidity — a hardcore, foul-mouthed feminist parody of woman-warrior tropes. She's brutal, beautiful, and totally bad.

Big boots, tight pants, ripped shirt — too-small bra. She snogs off with a kangaroo mutant named Booga, lives in her tank (the interior of which is a hoarder's nightmare of accumulated filth), and has adventures in a cartoon world as slam-bang explosive and high-speed surrealistically violent as anything experienced by the Roadrunner. “Nothing is real,” as old Hasan Sabbah once observed. “Everything is permitted.”

It’s not to be taken too seriously, in other words, even by comic-book-heroine standards. Stevie (who seems by issue two or thereabouts to replace the interspecial love affair between Booga and Tank) takes Tank Girl — wanted because she failed to deliver colostomy bags to Australian President Paul Hogan — to a voodoo witch-doctor uncle who doubles as a plastic surgeon. He stretches her head out until she looks like an alien with a balloon cranium — but Tank Girl never dies, the machinations of Sergeant Small Unit notwithstanding.

Even God gets into the act. God, a.k.a. “Eddie the Cheese,” leaves his bathrobe on Earth, where time travelers and ninjas come to try and scoop it up. But Tank Girl gets that sucker for herself, and she rips it to pieces to make herself a tube bra. Tank Girl kills — sometimes even by accident — eighty-sixing her enemies in her own unassuming, happy-go-lucky way. She’s a fab disaster, mate.

(We’re told this is Australia, as Crocodile Dundee as a geriatric president will attest. But I can’t help reading and imagining Tank Girl with an accent that makes her sound like actress Lori Petty, who portrayed Tank Girl in the cult-hit movie adaptation in the Nineties.)

There is something infectiously wonderful about Tank Girl — the artwork is mind-blowingly good, hearkening to classic comic strip style, Mad Magazine, dayglo psychedelia, and a sort of obsessive, staring-straight-at-the-viewer, pop-eyed psychopathy on the part of anthropomorphized kangaroos, koalas, and other weird, grinning, toothsome mutants with scrunched-up faces, commenting in small-print dialogue boxes while filling up the edges of the panels. The tanks, jets, missiles, and what-have-you weapons of destruction are drawn in Heavy Metal–style detail — it’s Eighties post-apocalyptic sci-fi parody with deeply strange vibes that must have sent shivers up the spines of readers when Alan Martin and Jamie Hewlett first rolled it out in the pages of Deadline magazine in 1988. TG quickly got her own book; Hewlett and Martin quickly realized she warranted it. Her popularity brought her to the silver screen, though transplanted from her typical futuristic Australian background to a much more homogenized American post-apocalypse.

But the PDF I have of the Penguin graphic novel from 1991 — a collection of the first TG stories all in one place — is such a light scan, and the artwork is so wonderfully detailed, that my eyeballs start sliding down my face and puddling in my lap page after page. I’m visually challenged, so the pleasure and joy I get from reading the Tank Girl graphic novel (and it is one of the few things that can raise a grin and a chuckle these days from the pit of my withered, blackened soul) is marred by the fact that just reading it BRINGS ME PAIN. I’m still thirty pages from the ending, and all I can say is: I am determined to ride this one out until the bitter end.

But Tank Girl? She’d say I was being a pussy. Then she’d spit, heft her serrated pigsticker, climb up into the turret of her up-armored, all-terrain mini-tank, and drive off into the Australian sunset — her head filled with dreams of boxing dingoes, sexy kangaroo men, God’s bathrobe, and President Paul, whose shits she really should have taken into consideration, one supposes.

But she’s Tank Girl. Ain’t nothing gonna slow her down. Not even my eyes.

“Damn your eyes!” — Victor Frahnkensteen.

Excelsior!

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