Strips

About Tank Girl

Tank Girl is the creation of Worthing comic artists Jamie Hewlett and Alan Martin.

In 1988 in their run-down Worthing bedsit, the two consumed tremendous amounts of cheap beer in an attempt to come up with something radical. Finally, on a Thursday night, sometime about 3am they created woman. Sassy, aggressive, skinhead woman - and she promptly spat in their eye. Tank Girl was born and thankfully, she made it just in time for issue #1 of Deadline Magazine.

DEADLINE was to be a forum for new comic talent, created by two artists, Steve Dillon and Brett Ewins. A magazine prepared to publish the wild, the wacky and the hitherto unpublishable. They hadn’t reckoned on TANK GIRL, whose very sweat could be bottled and sold as a weapon. From the moment the first pages of the strip arrived in the offices, Steve, Brett and publisher Tom Astor realised that THIS was what they and the unsuspecting world was waiting for.

FAME & FORTUNE TANK GIRL, was an immediate hit. When sober, restrained newspapers like The Independent enthused about Deadline’s "welcome, if outrageous, humour" they meant TANK GIRL’s beer-swilling, bawdy, boisterous romps. Seminal style magazine The Face referred to her as "Fab!", while the bible of British music, the New Musical Express, predicated "a rise to world domination".

It is difficult now to imagine the effect a comic character had. TANK GIRL was the talk of the magazine circuit - hailed by the press and by the media. With the arrogance of youth Jamie and Alan refused to be interviewed on Jonathan Ross’ cult late-night talk show "The Last Resort". With one jump, two guys from a small town in the sticks had landed in the big league. Baffled by the success, they waited in the wings for this sudden, unexpected fame to disappear - it didn’t.

MASS APPEAL TANK GIRL appealed to everyone - after all, there had never been a comic like this. People were quick to identify with her aggressive, no-bullshit attitude and her up front humour and sexuality. TANK GIRL t-shirts began to spring up - including a TANK GIRL t-shirt for the clause 28 march, against Thatcher’s homophobic legislation. TANK GIRL was not a sign of the times, she was the way forward. She was Thelma and Louise before the fact; she was Mad Max designed by Vivienne Westwood, Action Man designed by Jean-Paul Gaultier. She had style, wit and attitude in abundance and she’d spit in your eye and kick you in the nuts if you said different.

Penguin, the largest and most important publisher in Britain bought the rights to collect the TANK GIRL strips as a book (all Tank Girl strips appeared first in DEADLINE). Even now, it is the best selling illustrated book they have ever published. Offers for foreign rights were plentiful. Before long, TANK GIRL had been published in Spain, Italy, Germany, Scandinavia, Argentina, Brazil and Japan; several publishers were fighting for the US license.

Then, DEADLINE was approached by Wrangler Jeans who, keen to build an advertising campaign for their jeans that was individual and anarchic, parted with an undisclosed fee to use TANK GIRL in a series of press ads in 1991.

Bemused by the success of their creation, Hewlett and Martin subverted the character at every turn. Just when you thought you knew what TANK GIRL was about, she would change. She flirted with a hippy revival and new age fashion before it was fashionable, dabbled in post-modernism, hung out with the beat generation. TANK GIRL could be all things to all people and Jamie and Alan revelled in the freedom. More surprisingly, readers loved this freedom too. Far from wanting Tank Girl to be tied down to shooting, swilling and spitting, they wanted to see what Jamie and Alan could dream up next.

FIRST, WE TAKE MANHATTAN In the US, DARK HORSE COMICS had acquired the rights to publish TANK GIRL (and a US version of DEADLINE). To date, they have published two successful series of TANK GIRL’s adventures and two collections. The comic created something of a stir in the US and it was at this time that interest in a film first appeared.

TANK GIRL’s cult following was becoming increasingly bizarre: rock stars from ADAM ANT and BILLY BRAGG to THE RAMONES and NEW ORDER loved her and were keen to be involved in the magazine. Actors and comedians like LENNY HENRY, JONATHON ROSS were in awe of her. Then something more bizarre happened - after the Manchester music scene faded, a new group of British rock bands influenced by TANK GIRL rose to fame: BLUR, THE SENSELESS THINGS, CARTER USM, CURVE and TEENAGE FANCLUB. These were people who had grown up reading TANK GIRL. Comic strip and reality blurred: the bands appeared in the strips and Jamie’s artwork appeared on their record sleeves. The all-girl band, FUZZBOX, dressed as TANK GIRL for publicity shots. At the time, it seemed as though you needed an Equity or Musician’s Union card to buy a copy of DEADLINE.

Sarah Stockbridge, one of the most stunning models on the catwalks of Paris and London and the face behind punk designer Vivienne Westwood’s spectacular creations, approached DEADLINE asking if she could be TANK GIRL. The resulting photographs - the first time TG had truly been brought to life - cropped up in fashion spreads in "Elle", "Time Out", "Select" and "The Face". TANK GIRL’s influence was such that "Vogue" used her, citing her image as a crucial influence on "Bad Girl Fashion" (shaven heads, body piercing, tattoos). All this from a two-dimensional comic dreamt up by two unemployed layabouts in Worthing.

HOLLYWOOD AND BUST! Meanwhile, Rachel Talalay called up Tom Astor. She had been sent the TANK GIRL book for Christmas and was immediately smitten: she knew she HAD to make the movie. Rachel had an unswerving belief in the project. As TRILOGY took the project on and MGM began to nibble the bait, West Coast style magazines got wind of this bizarre, post-punk, post-modern thang. RAYGUN ran a feature on TG’s conquest of the universe, while WIRED tipped the Girl as "wired" (and Batman "tired"). MGM began pre-production on the TANK GIRL movie in January 1994.

Jamie and Alan thought they had hit the big time. Their dreams of being rich, famous, idle and bathing in asses milk seemed to be coming true. In fact, after legal fees, agent’s fees, taxes, duties and pay-offs to the mob, they came out with three lunches, two expenses-paid trips to London and £26.70 to buy a new Scalectrix. Meanwhile, letters started pouring from admirers of the coolest of cult comics denouncing them for selling out to some rich American director with more money than talent. We did try, but Steven Spielberg didn’t want it. The project had been pitched to Spielberg’s production company but they refused. It was rumoured that they thought the project was " too hip ". Others would have taken rejection badly; Jamie and Alan were delighted: TANK GIRL was TOO HIP FOR SPIELBERG!

The creators were initially sceptical about a Hollywood Tank Girl. ("Rambo with Tits" as Jamie dubbed it) But, having met Rachel, felt that she had a feel for the character. Rachel knew all about hip, having produced "Hairspray" and "Cry Baby" for cult trash guru John Waters, before blowing her credibility by directing "Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare". Now all we had to do was fend off the men in suits who felt they had some "input" that could make the movie "more coherent, more mainstream". The final film was a result of much fighting, some agreement, and too much compromise. Rachel fought bravely, but ultimately had to concede many of the points to the studio. To her credit, the film preserves the demented nonsensical charm of TG on the page, reeling from Busby Berkley to Mad Max and back through Tex Avery, it mystified American critics (and much of the American public), but sacrificing much of the raw, dangerous edge: the drugs, the bestiality, the beer-swilling and the sheer, wilful stupidity of the original."

The Tank Girl movie premiered on British TV at 10pm on Saturday 25th January 1997 on Sky Cable TV.

(the above text was shamelessly stolen from the Worthing community site with blatant disregard for copyright laws)