Tank Girl Movie on Blu Ray and having a flick knife fight with Adam Ant

plus The Man From Tank Girl

The Standard Edition of Eureka entertainment’s UK blu ray of the Tank Girl movie is now available. The original came with a book, for which I wrote the introduction. As that’s now out of print, I thought I would share that intro with you (see the end of this newsletter).

Meanwhile, here at Tank Girl H.Q. we have a few new items in store -

“The Man From Tank Girl” Secret Poster Magazine Special…

…which comes with…

…plus a trade card/ Agent ID card, art print, and postcard.

And our “Student Tea Cosy Demonstration” Posterzine, which comes with badges and prints…

…and finally, a badge of my O Level art exam piece from 1982 - a painted portrait of Johnny Rotten (I scored a B grade for my efforts)…

All available now from THE OFFICIAL TANK GIRL STORE

Cherri Clampett, Jamie, Adam Ant, Alan, Adam’s house, Beverly Hills 1994

For those of you that missed it, here’s my introduction to the Blu Ray book -

“We stood on the rooftop terrace of The Griffith Observatory (the same place where Nicholas Roeg had filmed James Dean in Rebel Without A Cause in 1955), the Hollywood sign was lit up on the adjacent hillside, Century City glistened in the distance, and all of downtown Los Angeles spread out before us like a magic carpet of dreams and possibilities. 1980s New-Romantic punk rocker Adam Ant (who had kindly taken it upon himself to act as our tour guide around Hollywood for our trip) was trying to get us to re-enact the flick-knife fight from Rebel Without A Cause with him.

Jamie Hewlett and I were two fresh-faced youths from the South Coast of England who had created a shambolic, unprofessional and, at times, totally incomprehensible comic strip about a girl who lived in a tank and had a kangaroo as a boyfriend. MGM had flown us to Beverly Hills to sign a movie contract. Adam Ant wanted us to fight.

How the hell had we arrived at this situation?

From humble beginnings as a single-page mock-advertisement in a fanzine we’d produced whilst studying at Worthing Art College, Tank Girl then sprang into life in October 1988 as the breakout character in Brett Ewins and Steve Dillon’s monthly publication Deadline magazine, dedicated to comics, music and culture. She ram-raided the British comics industry, ignoring conventional comic book thinking and formatting, eschewing meaningful plot and character development, and making sworn enemies of the Old Guard and the gatekeepers of “Proper Comics.”

Once she was rolling there was no stopping her, and ideas and offers for projects outside of the comics medium came thick and fast: an animated TV series? A punk band fronted by Tank Girl? An advert for Wrangler’s jeans? Yeah, why the hell not. Some projects came to fruition, some didn’t, but Jamie and I faced it all with an air of stoic stupidity, because… that’s what Tank Girl would’ve done. It seemed disingenuous to play it any other way.

Penguin Books offered to publish the first year’s worth of stories in a single volume graphic novel, so Tank Girl: Book One was born. Director and producer Rachel Talalay was given a copy of the book by her daughter for Christmas, and she instantly fell in love with the raw, edgy craziness of the comic. Rachel started touting it around Hollywood to see if any studios were interested in adapting it into a movie. She was turned down by nearly everyone (famously, Steven Spielberg politely declined, stating that the property was “too hip” for him, which sparked our instant “Too Hip For Spielberg” Tank Girl t-shirt design). Finally the pitch was seen by Alan Ladd Jr. This was the same guy who had green-lit the first Star Wars movie back in the mid-1970s. He saw something in Tank Girl that he thought was worthwhile and pressed the green button. This is it, we thought, we’re gonna make our own Star Wars.

Of course, the early incarnation of our comic was almost completely unadaptable; in our fight to not be categorised or pigeon-holed, and in the wilful obscurity of some of our plots and in-jokes, we had created something that made no conventional sense. At the time we thought that was cool and funny, but for the guys trying to make commercially viable blockbuster movies it was complete gibberish, what were they meant to do with that stuff?

So some things had to change to make a movie that held together. First, and most noticeable from the outset, the movie became post-apocalyptic; a devastating event had created the opportunity for one entity to monopolise a resource (very Mad Max) and grab ultimate power. In contrast, we had relative civilisation in the comic: a President (Paul Hogan!), state armies, hot and cold running water, and a little bookshop where Gustav Klimt could be seen shopping with George Gurdjieff. The original world of the comic was a neo-Western, in which Tank Girl and her gang could roam around the dusty Outback, antagonise authority, cause chaos and generally upset the status quo of society by being naughty outlaws. The world in the movie feels closer to sci-fi, where Tank Girl is driven by revenge and a quest to free an abducted child.

Movie Tank Girl is a lone-wolf, having started out as part of a dysfunctional nuclear family, only to be wrenched away after the senseless execution of her lover and friends. This is another key change in the adaptation; whereas in the comic we would’ve played the annihilation of Tank Girl’s family for laughs (hilarious, yeah?), the movie used it to give the character a serious purpose and to add weight to the story. Jamie and I wrote stupid storylines, and layered them with a sprinkling of pathos and yet more silliness. The movie took a scenario that was heavy and consequential, and then added the jokes over the top.

This made for a different flavour of humour, but it would’ve been hard to turn one of our early comic stories into a feature-length movie; unless you’re making a spoof, you have to have some emotional pull, something for the audience to anchor to. Since the movie was released in 1995, we have created Tank Girl stories with more emotional depth, and attempted the fine juggling act of balancing seriousness, poignancy and humour. That’s probably the most significant way that the movie has managed to feed back into the comics.

Adam won the flick-knife fight (no real flick-knives were used in this faux altercation), and then he took us out to dinner at a restaurant that was designed by Walt Disney; it was like eating chips in Snow White’s cottage. The next day at MGM, we signed on the dotted line, chinked the glasses, smoked the cigars. The rest is history.

Whether Tank Girl would still exist as a comic without the cult popularity of the movie is an unknown. I’m certain that at least half of our readership is made up of people who came to Tank Girl through seeing the movie first – and then discovered that there is a whole continent of lunacy waiting to be explored through the books and comics.

The celluloid and paper versions of Tank Girl have now lived alongside each other for three decades, and whether you found the comics through the movie, or you found the movie through the comics, I hope you have fun tucking into this new high definition release with all of its bonus side-dishes. And then maybe you could try a few comics for pudding?”

Eureka Entertainment’s standard UK edition of Tank Girl The Movie

Love and best wishes,

Yours truly,

Alan C. Martin

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