She’s back to wreak her own unique brand of havoc. From the depths of the outback she charges, astride her fabulous tank! Run for the hills - it’s Tank Girl! The adventures of everybody’s favourite beer-swilling, chain-smoking, kangaroo-worrying, tank-driving anarchist continue as she escapes from an asylum, goes on the road with Jack Kerouac, solves a couple of mysteries and joins Booga’s Treehouse Club...

There is some evidence in this second “remastered” collection of comic strips (originally published in Deadline magazine in early 1990 to early 1993) to suggest that, by this time, Jamie Hewlett and Alan Martin were starting to get bored with the original Tank Girl concept or were running out of ideas for it, because the stories herein deviate considerably from what had gone before.

Tank Girl herself spends relatively little time in her usual Aussie outback setting. She visits the UK in “Summer Love Sensation” and steps out of her narrative environment altogether when she is sacked from Deadline and cast out on to the street in “The Fall and Rise and Fall and the Ship in the Bottle”. She meets her own creators in “Force Ten to Ringarooma Bay” and “Summer Love Sensation”, the plots to both of which depart on Pythonesque tangents. “Force Ten...” ends up turning into an exquisitely detailed spoof of The Prisoner. It’s hard to tell whether H and M were being wacky for the sake of it, or whether they just couldn’t think of ways to end these stories!

Some of the strips don’t feature Tank Girl at all. Her kangaroo boyfriend Booga takes the lead in the drugged-up 1970s cop-show spoof “Askey & Hunch” and in “Booga’s Christmas Carol”. Tank Girl’s pal Jet Gurl (sic) appears in “Hairy Pussy”, a story within a story concerning a Wild West sheriff called Harry Poussini. A similar frame narrative surrounds “Blue Helmet”, although Tank Girl does appear in the main story - as do a gang of bears who resemble a fusion of Hanna-Barbera’s Yogi Bear, the Hair Bear Bunch and the Banana Splits!

Each of these narrative detours gives Hewlett the opportunity to tailor his artistic style accordingly, ranging from the more cartoony style of “Hairy Pussy” and “Askey & Hunch” to the intricate detail of “The Fall and Rise and Fall...”

Many of the pages are beautifully hand-coloured by Hewlett himself, including an exceedingly rare two-page contribution to 1991’s Totally Stonking, Surprisingly Educational and Utterly Mindboggling Comic Relief Comic. Others are presented in their original black-and-white form, “as nature intended”. My only real criticism is that some of the details of what were double-page spreads are lost in the gutter.

In spite of that, and despite (or because of) the creators deviating from their original concept, this collection remains anarchically entertaining.

8

Richard McGinlay