Tank Girl helped me survive my teens. My love for her is influenced by my feminism and 90s nostalgia, but it truly springs from a place of profound 12 year old outsiderdom and rage.
Just to be clear I’m talking about what I think of as Tank Girl — the comics not the film (oh God not the film) and basically the first two volumes of the collected comic by Jamie Hewlett and Alan Martin.
After that the stories aren’t so strong in my eyes, and I don’t enjoy the artwork as much. But anyway: there’s a little chunk of my soul which belongs to early Tank Girl.
Where to start? She looks awesome. Yes, she’s often in a bra, and yes, she has a slightly implausible figure, but she’s a million miles away from traditional cheesecake comic book heroines. She is rather androgynous, with strong masculine and feminine qualities. Plus she has actual facial expressions and a great philosophy about clothes. She is sexy, and sexual, but in a way which entirely rejects the idea of a performed sex appeal.
Then there’s her attitude. Irreverent and subversive to the very core of her being, she is linked in some of the stories with a demonic force, a sort of soul of chaos. There’s a great story where an aboriginal community summons a kind of mystical proto-Tank Girl (called Tanicha) to wreak bloody vengeance on the white men who are trying to steal their land and who assault the women in the community.*
Tanicha slaughters them gleefully, and in interestingly gendery ways. Tank Girl laughs at danger, power, pomp and duty in a thrilling and vicariously liberating way.
But then there are a few moments in which she is breathtakingly, shockingly human, even vulnerable. In one story, she dreams that her friends and her boyfriend have had their minds destroyed in a psychiatric institution, One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest-stylee. She wakes up shaken and goes to sit outside her beloved tank to think. As the sun comes up, her boyfriend brings her a mug of tea. He’s a mutant kangaroo called Booga, for anyone who doesn’t know, but that doesn’t make the moment any less touching.
Although many of the characters that accompany her on her adventures are men, her female relationships are surprisingly significant. Her two childhood friends Jet Girl and Sub Girl are introduced in a story about her birthday party (spoiled through a lack of decent beer) and one issue consists of a letter from Tank Girl to her mum. She also goes to England at one point to visit her sick grandmother.
And some of the best stories are where she gets one over on a series of macho tough guys, from a kangaroo gang leader to a bounty hunter who underestimates her special gift for total destruction.
In one of my favourites her former sergeant becomes obsessed with her lack of respect and her lack of discipline, and sets out to annihilate her. In his dream he prepares to blow her apart with a rocket but she just laughs at him.
Sergeant: “Look at me when I’m going to kill you!”
Tank: “The male ego rides again… Should I faint or scream? Ha ha ha ha!”
Then her breasts transform into missiles. Which makes the point quite nicely, I feel.
Tank Girl is not a positive role model. She’s not a ‘strong female character’. Unlike, say, the similarly badass Starbuck in the Battlestar Galactica reboot, she’s not particularly troubled, and she doesn’t experience remorse.
But when I was a weird 12-year-old at school, powerless and furious, she was a lifeline. I’m sure my Tank Girl-inspired dreams of destruction saved me from seriously lashing out at someone in real life.
When my peers were throwing sandwiches at me on the bus I’d just think, “What would Tank Girl do?” And I’d lean my head against the window and enjoy the carnage.
*I guess it’s not great that Hewlett and Martin patch in a bit of faux aboriginal culture as it suits them? But one of the main characters (Stevie) is an indigenous Australian and there’s nothing particularly mystical about him at least.
[originally published on Bad Reputation in 2011]
