For this week on the wide world of comics, I read the British comic, Tank Girl. This was an easy choice for me to read as it had been on my to read list for years. One of my friends in high school absolutely loved it so I was familiar with the title and figured now would be a good time to read it.
Sufficed to say, it was definitely not what I was expecting. I knew it was based in a post apocalyptic setting, but that lead me to expect a far more ‘serious’ story. This is not to say I didn’t enjoy it, because there was a definite delight I had in its absurdity, but the first few pages took some adjusting to. It had a strangely light hearted tone about what would normally be a very serious topic. Its full of sex, drugs and violence, but all of this is just treated as ‘part of the fun’.
When I realized this was written in the late 80s and 90s I wasn’t surprised. Tank girl is practically a love letter to punk culture. Both the fashion and topics contained are very much reminiscent of punk. The punk movement was sweeping apparently leaking into Europe and comics were full of these ‘darker themes’. Characters like Lobo and Spawn were popping up and more and more comic characters were carrying huge guns. These dark themes were no longer ‘underground’ like they were in the 70s during the Underground Comix movement, and were now practically main stream. This punk movement was at its high wen comics were selling better than they ever have at any point in their history. It was now ‘cool’ to be gritty.
Tank Girl itself seemed to just have fun with the whole punk concept. The actual plot was practically nonexistent, events happening so randomly. Like one second she’s on the moon stopping an apocalypse and the next she’s giving birth to a half tank/ half baby child who has a mutant kangaroo for a father. The whole experience of reading it was really a wild ride like no other.
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