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Sunday, January 24, 2010

She just the girl....the girl you want.



Tank Girl is a British comic created by Jamie Hewlett and Alan Martin. Originally drawn by Jamie Hewlett, the strip is currently drawn by Rufus Dayglo, Ashley Wood, and Mike McMahon.




The titular character Tank Girl drives a tank, which is also her home. She undertakes a series of missions for a nebulous organization before making a serious mistake and being declared an outlaw for her sexual inclinations and her substance abuse. The comic centers on her misadventures with her boyfriend, Booga, a mutant kangaroo. The comic's style was heavily influenced by punk visual art, and strips were frequently deeply disorganized, anarchic, absurdist, and psychedelic. The strip features various elements with origins in surrealist techniques, fanzines, collage, cut-up technique, stream of consciousness, and metafiction, with very little regard or interest for conventional plot or committed narrative.

The strip was initially set in a stylized post-apocalyptic Australia, although it drew heavily from contemporary British pop culture.




The image was published in the fanzine as a one-page ad (with a caption that read: "SHE'LL BREAK YOUR BACK AND YOUR BALLS!"), but the Tank Girl series first appeared in the debut issue of Deadline (1988), a UK magazine intended as a forum for new comic talent, or as its publishers Brett Ewins and Tom Astor put it, "a forum for the wild, wacky and hitherto unpublishable," and it continued until the end of the magazine in 1995.




Tank Girl became quite popular in the politicized indie counterculture zeitgeist as a cartoon mirror of the growing empowerment of women in punk rock culture. Posters and t-shirts began springing up everywhere, including one especially made for the Clause 28 march against Margaret Thatcher's legislation. Clause 28 stated that a local authority "shall not intentionally promote homosexuality or publish material with the intention of promoting homosexuality" or "promote the teaching in any maintained school of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship." Deadline publisher Tom Astor said, "In London, there are even weekly lesbian gatherings called 'Tank Girl nights.'"





With public interest growing, Penguin, the largest publishing company in Britain, bought the rights to collect the strips as a book, and before long, Tank Girl had been published in Spain, Italy, Germany, Scandinavia, Argentina, Brazil and Japan, with several US publishers fighting over the license. Finally Dark Horse Comics won out, and the strips were reprinted in color beginning in '91, with an extended break in '92, and ending in September '93. A graphic novel-length story named Tank Girl: The Odyssey was also published in '95, written by Peter Milligan and loosely inspired by Homer's Odyssey, Joyce's Ulysses and a considerable quantity of junk TV, (although Milligan asserts in the preface that the story is entirely based on real events, inspired by the wanderings and adventures of a group of lost friends, all of whom appear in the pages under various pseudonyms). Another graphic novel called Tank Girl: Apocalypse, in which TG becomes pregnant, also appeared in '96, written by Alan Grant after he spent several hours alone in the pitch-dark bowels of an actual tank, experiencing sensory deprivation. Apocalypse was co-authored and drawn by Philip Bond. These last two stories, being graphic novels and not compilations of the strips, are distinctly more linear in nature, Apocalypse having absolutely no involvement from either Martin or Hewlett (and being dramatically less well-received by fans.

Wanna see more?.... of course you do,
http://www.tankgirl.info/tankgirl/index2.html

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