Tanked Up And Ready To Party

Get inside the bastard child of Messrs Martin and Hewlett as never before with tons of unseen artwork, rare comic strips, exclusive new commentary from writer Alan Martin, every Jamie Hewlett Tank Girl cover ever, publicity posters, script samples and more besides. This really is a no-holds-barred guide to the roo-screwing, chain-smoking filth and fury of Tank Girl!

Alan C. Martin Interview

Titan Books: What are fans going to find in The Cream of Tank Girl?

Alan C. Martin: I’ve scoured Jamie’s archive and fleeced my mother’s loft to find stuff for The Cream of Tank Girl. Basically it’s gonna be a chunky “coffee-table” style art book, featuring every unpublished piece of art, script, and sketch that I could lay my hands on, along with all of Jamie's covers for Deadline Magazine, and all collaborations between Jamie and myself from that time. All this with a boring, monotone commentary from me. It's gonna be a pretty special book, and not too expensive!

What was your inspiration for creating Tank Girl?

I was instrumental in creating about 30% of Tank Girl, so much of her was her visual style, and Jamie had most of that in his head before we started to get stuff down on paper. However, I did add a lot of “flavor” to the character – my dressing on Jamie’s salad, so to speak. Some of the original sparks of inspiration came from Mick Lynch (of the band Stump)’s bald-with-a-clump-at-the-front haircut, Paul Hogan’s Crocodile Dundee, the Greebo look of Pop Will Eat Itself, 70s zombie movies, surf music, and a girl at college.

How critical are you when looking back at your old work?

I don’t really have time for criticism of the old stuff; it’s out there already in a dozen different formats, so there’s nothing I can do about it. I am, however, quite harsh on myself in relation to work in progress. But at the end of the day, the nature of Tank Girl is chaos, and you’ve just got to let it flow.

What is your favorite Tank Girl storyline?

That’ll have to be “The Mount Mushroom Massacre”, where Tank Girl and Booga rob an amusement park, escape on a bouncy castle owned by Graham Coxon, and spend their ill-gotten gains on a Mount Rushmore style memorial to themselves. I think that was the last “proper” story I did with Jamie, I remember we had a lot of fun putting it together.

How did you approach writing Tank Girl: Armadillo, the character’s first prose novel?

That was the first Tank Girl related thing I’d written in well over a decade, so my approach was tentative to say the least. I wrote it in short bursts, not necessarily in the right order, and then once I had a decent amount of pages, the whole thing started to take on some kind of form.

How do you think new readers discovering the original Tank Girl comics in 2008 are going to react to her, compared to those who first read the books in the late 80s?

Hesitantly bemused.

Do you consider the new remastered editions of Tank Girl to be the definitive versions?

No. They’re just a fresher way of looking at them. The main thrust behind the project was to lose the computer coloring, which was done way back in the early nineties, and which has dated in a wholly different way from the actual artwork. So this is a chance to see the strips as they were originally printed in Deadline Magazine.

Do you identify with Tank Girl, or are any of the other regulars – Barney, Booga etc – closer to your personality? Which would you most/least like to be stuck in an elevator with?

I guess the Tank Girl team are all different aspects of me as a whole, so I relate to them all in some way – Tank Girl’s anger, Booga’s stupidity, Jet Girl’s couldn’t-give-a-shit-ness, Barney’s psychosis – but probably Tank Girl the most, as my thoughts get to dribble out of her mouth, unchecked and uncontrolled. I’d least like to be stuck in an elevator with Booga, because he's a bloke and because he'd probably do really rank farts.