Tank Girl is back. The comic book phenomenon of the Britpop era has returned in a new comic full of everything you'd expect if you were reading first time around - tanks, topless girls and topless mutant kangaroos, big guns, huge sound effects and a spaceship that resembles male genitalia.
The creation of Berwick-based writer Alan Martin and artist Jamie Hewlett, when she first appeared in the pages of Deadline magazine at the end of the 1980s Tank Girl was a surly, snotty reproach to the comic medium's new seriousness. It offered punk attitudes in primary colours. Malcolm McLaren once declared: "Be childish. Be irresponsible. Be disrespectful. Be everything this society hates." Hewlett and Martin took that motto to heart and produced a strip full of bratty energy, adolescent humour and ultraviolence. It became a huge cult success and not even a poorly received big screen version IN 1995 could totally kill off. In fact, she's never really gone away (see below).
Still, Titan are publishing a new run of comic books with art by creator Hewlett, as well as Brett Parson, Warwick Johnson-Cadwell, Jonathan Edwards and Philip Bond. To celebrate its release Tank Girl writer Alan Martin (who lives in Berwick upon Tweed, so we can almost claim him as Scottish) has agreed to answer some questions for Graphic Content.
Hurrah, Tank Girl is back. But why now?
We've been publishing new Tank Girl stories for eight years now - ten new graphic novels, the five remastered "classic" books, an art book, and a text novel. So not really a recent comeback!
Presumably she has settled down these days. Working in the garden, watching Antiques Roadshow; that kind of thing?
She's older, but that doesn't mean she's calmed down at all. She's just grumpier and spends more time in the lavatory.
What keeps you wanting to tell these stories?
Paying bills by doing something other than working in a sausage roll factory.
What is your own favourite make of tank? Sherman? Panzer? Septic?
Right now it's the Sherman, mainly because of the film Fury.
When did you last watch the Tank Girl movie?
From start to finish, last time was 1995, when I sneaked into a cinema in Edinburgh and watched it with my wife. We didn't go to the premiere in LA, we ran away instead.
The first issue of 21st Century Tank Girl is available now
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