nicole_powers

Hollywood nearly killed Tank Girl. Dodgy movies have a way of doing that to people. Tank Girl's creators, writer Alan Martin and artist Jamie Hewlett, would be the first to say the 1995 big screen incarnation of the cult comic strip character, which they had zero control over, wasn't all that it should have been. Indeed they might even say it was a "shit sandwich" (well, actually, Martin did). Fortunately, Tank Girl's superhuman, and her fuck you spirit would never allow a bunch of scummy film execs and industry cheese weasels to have the last word. Down but not out, after a hiatus of over a decade, she put her Tank Boots back on, and kicked, screamed and farted her way back from near oblivion, with a little help from Martin.

In the process of documenting Tank Girl's past for a best-of book called The Cream of Tank Girl (out October 2008), Martin found a renewed passion for his foul-mouthed, mutant kangaroo-humping friend. Original draftsman Jamie Hewlett may have moved on to pastures new with Damon Albarn and their virtual Gorillaz band, but Tank Girl has found new pen pals to roughhouse with.

With a slew of fresh Tank Girl adventures already in print, in the bag, and on the horizon, Martin and his badly behaved progeny are smashing ("Sleesh! Plock! Glump!") their way into one of their most prolific periods ever. We sat down for a long distance chat with Martin, and took a gander at what the future holds for Tank Girl.

Alan Martin: Where are you calling from?

Nicole Powers: Los Angeles.

AM: What accent is that? It doesn't sound very American.

NP: No, you've got me there, I'm actually from Sheffield.

AM: Are you? That's just down the road from me then.

NP: So where are you right now?

AM: Well not just down the road, I live in Berwick-Upon-Tweed just on the border with Scotland.

NP: That's along way from where Tank Girl started in Worthing.

AM: It is, yes, thankfully.

NP: How did you end up there?

AM: My wife started a business with her mother running a shop, so we now live here and started our family here, a long way from Worthing. It couldn't be further in fact without going into Scotland.

NP: So are we going to see Tank Girl painting her face blue and going all Braveheart on us?

AM: [laughs] That's a good idea actually. I hadn't thought of that, but yeah, we could take it in that direction.

NP: When you created Tank Girl some twenty years ago, what was the original concept? What did you have in mind?

AM: Nothing really. It was just a hotchpotch of ideas, of things that we liked. There was no real formula to it. Everything that went in just had to tick the cool boxes, you know. Did it look good? Did it sound good? Did it taste good? If it did, then it was OK to go in our comic. So pretty much everything that we were into, the style of clothes we were wearing, and all our friends were wearing, whatever band we were into. And as far as formulating story lines or plots, it just never happened. There was no high-brow construction. It was just what do we like? Brilliant, we'll put it in. That was as far as it went.

NP: You mention the clothes, and I have to say out of any comic book character Tank Girl has the coolest wardrobe.

AM: Yeah, well that's all entirely down to Jamie. I just dress like a tramp basically.

NP: If we opened up your closet doors what would we see?

AM: Mould. [laughs] Mildew and mould. No, I'm not that bad really, but Jamie is a real clothes horse, he really loves his clothes. He always did, even when he didn't have much money he was very, in a way, sharply dressed by going to charity shops and thrift shops, if that's possible. But he always had a very idiosyncratic style that was all his own, so that completely carried through to the comics. But the gang that we were all in, we all dressed very similarly in the current styles that were around, we all had leather jackets etc., etc.. So that all filtered through into the original Tank Girl, and then, as time went on, hippy influences came in as crusty and grunge reared its head and everything mutated slowly right the way through to Brit pop, when it all just went down the pan.

NP: That was one of the things that shocked me with the Tank Girl book, I never realized that she had a psychedelic, flower-powered, hippy-dippy period. What was that about?

AM: [laughs] I think it was a lot to do with us smoking too much pot really, and watching Easy Rider whilst we were drawing comics. There was definitely a few months where we were getting very stoned and watching Easy Rider or Woodstock the movie or whatever else was made in that era, you know, anything with Jack Nicholson in from the mid-sixties, so that all just filtered through, and then the same as all the original influences, they just sort of disappeared as we moved onto something else with our limited attention span.

NP: She has changed over the years. I guess if she was in her mid-twenties in 1988 that would put her in her mid-forties come 2008.

AM: Yes. Well, I guess the only mention I ever made of her age in the comic was at the beginning of one of the early strips when she says, "I'm 23," and that was when I was 23. So, yes, she'd be exactly the same age as me, and I was 22 ten it all started and I'm 42 now on her 20th anniversary. You don't need to be a mathematician to work that one out, but yes, she would be in her forties.

NP: Would she be wearing sensible shoes by now do you think?

AM: Some of the time, some of the time with her tongue firmly in her cheek. We did actually, when Ashley Wood, the artist who did the comeback series last year, The Gifting, he did the initial publicity poster for it and he drew her looking like a librarian. The picture came through to me and it was just a complete shock. I looked at it and went, "Oh my god. That is truly upsetting because everyone is going to say, 'why isn't she dressed like a punk anymore.'"

Then I thought about it and I remembered a line form the beginning of Darling with Julie Christie. In the movie she [talks] about not rebelling being the new rebellion, and so I wrote a blog about that and put it out, and the backlash was phenomenal. People were so upset. They thought that Tank Girl had changed into this sort of normal working girl, a nine-to-fiver dressed in middle class clothing, and we were almost lynched for it. Absolutely no one had a sense of humor about her. I was sat there going, "this is great," because it got us so much more publicity than if we'd just drawn her wearing what she was wearing when everyone last saw her.

NP: You really know how to ruin people's days.

AM: I know, but originally, like I say in The Cream of Tank Girl, that was what happened first time around, we were always battling other people's preconceived ideas of what she was. If anyone came up to us and went, "Brilliant, she's so much like me," we'd look at the and go, "Right, we're going to make her so much not like you the next time she comes in a comic." So we just kicked back against everything that tried to assimilate her, that tried to claim her or dominate her.

And it worked again with Ashley. I don't know whether he was actually thinking that, or whether he just doodled away and that's what came out but, yes, the backlash had started even before the comic came out. I was just laughing because, you know, it's a comic character, people need to get a bit of perspective really.

NP: Obviously Tank Girl had her Hollywood period. I always knew Tank Girl was going to go Hollywood because she had really white teeth. She was destined to go there. And I was watching the film last night, and what struck me was I couldn't understand what Gwen Stefani was doing running around in a tank. Lori Petty has the Gwen Stefani look, voice and...

AM: Or perhaps the other way around.

NP: I think so, I think so.

AM: Which came first, yeah. Yes, well, you know, people have their influences, however perverse they might be.

NP: In interviews you talk about how you would have liked to put Grange Hill and Benny Hill references into the Tank Girl script...

AM: Well, we were never actually really allowed to touch anything to do with that film. It was actually written into our contract that we weren't to have anything to do with it, but they did sort of wave the script in front of us. I think that quote came from Jamie, and I think it was a bit of artistic license there, but we did want to include references to the stuff that was in the original comic, but, obviously, ninety percent of it would have been lost on a worldwide audience because it was purely Brit stuff. The children's TV shows that we referenced, and the seventies pop bands, would have been lost on an American or even Australian [audience], so yeah, any idea like that we put forward to them was vetoed instantly, and so we soon thought that we wouldn't bother so...

NP: You say that, but since the success of shows like The Office, Ali G, and Little Britain, which is now in the USA, American's have become a lot more tolerant of us Brits twittering on about shit that means nothing to them, and they kind of get a kick out of it on some level, so do you think if it had been written today, you'd have been able to get away with a lot more?

AM: I still don't know. They focus grouped it in front of sixteen year olds. I think with The Office, and stuff like that, you'll get a more high-brow audience, even though it's quite a daft show it will be more lenient. But with your average MTV crowd, probably they'd look at it and go, "sorry, I don't know what you're talking about. This is absolute nonsense, I can't understand it," and they'd maybe be less tolerant of it. But, that said, I didn't think that was the audience we should have been aiming for. It shouldn't have been MTV, it should have been a much more cult film, it should have been much lower budget, and it should have had me writing it.

NP: Would you go for it again if you had the opportunity to do it right?

AM: We don't own the rights. MGM own the rights. We sold the rights. "In perpetuity" I think it says on the contract. MGM/UA own the rights, but I think it's actually been sold on to Sony. Anyway, whoever's got it probably doesn't even know they've got it, and I think the idea of doing another movie might be like throwing good money after bad, but you never know, you never know. I never thought I'd write the comic again -- that happened.

NP: What inspired you to revisit Tank Girl?

AM: What happened was, about seven years ago, Titan, the U.K. publishers, came to us and they said, "we'd like to have a bash at reissuing the Tank Girl stuff," because...there was obviously interest still out there. They said they'd like to reissue all of the original books. I wrote introductions for them and for one of them, because it was a bit of a thin book, I wrote a fake script supposedly that hadn't been used back in the early nineties, just to fill a few pages. It was an unused script with no images or anything, and I wrote it in about a day, and I just sat there and thought, "Well, that was easy." Then I looked at it and thought, "Well, actually I think that's quite good as far as Tank Girl scripts go."

So I suggested to them that we generate some new stuff, and then I started writing some more prosaic stuff rather than scripts, just short stories etc., and that formed the basis of my novel in inverted commas, Armadillo, which came out earlier this year. From then on it all just sort of spiralled. After that I wrote The Gifting, the series, and then punted that around looking for artists, and eventually came up with Ashley Wood, and it all grew from there.

NP: And now you have Rufus Dayglo doing some of the art.

AM: Rufus is pretty much doing all of it now. He's a comic drawing machine, and my savior.

NP: So how did you bump into him?

AM: Well actually, when I first wrote the Armadillo book, I was having trouble getting it published, so I published it myself and sold it on eBay. I was just printing to order. People would order it from me, I'd print it off on my home printer and just package it up and send it out. I sent it out around the world, to Japan and America and Kuala Lumpur, and various places, and Rufus in London, being an avid Tank Girl fan from back in the day, and also a comic art dealer, so he's always looking for stuff like that, he bought a copy off of me. Then he just got in touch with me, and he said, "This is great, what else are you doing?"

I told him that I'd written some comic scripts, and he said, "Well, why don't you do it with Ashley Wood, 'cause Ashley's a big Tank Girl fan." So he actually put me in touch with Ashley. At the time Rufus was working for an animation studio, but eventually he just ended up being the artist. It just seemed so natural. Ashley brought him in to do some layouts on the first comics, and from that we could just see that he had the sense of humor, and he had the style, and it all worked very well. We haven't looked back really. Rufus is just doing so much, he just has so much output. He's a very fast artist, he does two pages a day, so I'm having trouble keeping up with him because I don't write that fast.

NP: Stylistically what do you think Rufus brings to the page?

AM: I mean it's a whole different Tank Girl from what Jamie used to do, but Rufus is like an original punk. He knows loads of punks, not just punks on the street, he knows lots of actual punk bands etc.. He was very good friends with Dee Dee Ramone, who's going to be making an appearance in one of our comics actually, in Skidmarks.

He's a spikey-haired chap. His arms are covered in tattoos of Mick McMahon's Judge Dredd, and you just need to look at him and you know he's got style that is just sort of oozing out of his pores. In the same way Jamie had his particular style, you can tell instantly just by looking at him. He's a very impressive look, and he brings that to it, and his own peculiar sense of humor etc.. He brings the full kit. Everything I need, and also empathy with my scripts and my sense of humor.

NP: What can we expect in the future from you guys?

AM: Well at the moment we're just concentrating solely on standard comics. We're doing a strip in the U.K. in Judge Dredd Magazine, which is called Skidmarks. That's just eight pages a month, but that will be put into comics which will be come out as a mini series which will come out next year. That will be available in the States. Then that will come out in a graphic novel.

Next year we're doing another series with IDW, who did the stuff with Ashley Wood for us, called The Royal Escape. That's scheduled for around late spring I think. Also, we've got a whole new series that we're doing with Titan called Bad Wind Rising, which will be lots of little stories. So really, just a complete blitz on comics.

Also, it's taken a long time to manifest, but with original 200 AD artist Mick McMahon, were doing a six part comic called Carioca which is a whole complete departure from what Tank Girl usually looks like, and usually sounds like. It's a strange hybrid, but all very interesting stuff.

NP: Does Tank Girl appear in all these strips?

AM: It's all Tank Girl. Everything I said, it's all Tank Girl, that's what she's up to until, pretty much Christmas 2009, and maybe a bit beyond that.

NP: You have this book, The Cream of Tank Girl, coming out. Was that a trip to put together? Because you've got early sketches and bits torn off someone's jacket. How was it pulling all that stuff together? Was it all organized? Or did you have to rip the house apart?

AM: Well at lot of it was in my mom's loft, a lot of it was in Jamie's plan chest, and the rest of it was on eBay. I spent about a year just gathering magazines. I had a few copies of Deadline, where it was all originally produced from back in the day, but I've now got a full set of them. I had to get all that together, and I had to rifle through my mum's loft and rescue bits and bobs that were just buried in trunks from 20 years ago. Jamie's stuff as well, I had to go through his archive, if you can call it that, and scan all that in.

It was a labor of love. It took about a year and a half, even though it doesn't look like it, just to actually get enough stuff that was of good enough quality to make a book and then sit down and make notes on all of that, and chronologicalize it. It was a work.

NP: In that process of rediscovering your own life, what did you discover that you'd forgotten you knew, or forgotten you felt, or forgotten you did?

AM: I don't know if I'd forgotten any of it to be honest. I think because I'd spent so long not writing, and doing jobs that I didn't want to do, I dwelt on the stuff that I did love to do, and those memories maybe sort of became larger than life. I don't think any of it was buried in my memory, it all came to the fore very easily.

NP: Did the process of looking back bring back the enthusiasm? Because right now you're probably going through one of your most prolific periods ever.

AM: Yes, I was a lazy sod back in the day. I really didn't do a lot for my bread and butter. Yes, it did, it definitely rekindled my love for the character. Because the last thing that we did, the movie, not that we did it, but it just left such a bad taste in our mouths. We didn't even discuss it, we just knew we had to leave it behind, so that rekindled my enthusiasm, but also becoming a father has made me pull my finger out.

NP: How many children?

AM: I've just got one at the moment, just a little two-year old. A little boy, Rufus.

NP: It's going to be interesting as a dad, because obviously Tank Girl was quite a controversial character, with a potty mouth and some interesting sexual peccadilloes. At what point would you want your son reading this?

AM: It's funny...my nephew had an argument with this kid at school. He said, "My uncle writes Tank Girl." And this other kid, who'd obviously never even heard of Tank Girl, said, "Yeah, well so does mine." He had this big argument with him over whose dad actually wrote Tank Girl. So he told me that, and I though I could just give him a copy of Tank Girl and like sign it and he could take it along.

Then I thought, no, all of this has got swearing in it. So the last series has no swearing in it. Visions of Booga, it has a "bastard" here and a "bitch" there, but it doesn't have any F-words or C-words. So I'd given him the whole collection of that and he's sort of proudly taken it to school to show his mate and say, "Look, there you go." And we name checked him on one of the pages as well, just to really sort of rub it in. So I'll probably show my son that one first to break him in, then wait until he's eighteen and say, "Look, this is what it's really about."

NP: Do you think that's going to influence you as you're doing the Tank Girl stuff moving forward? Are you going to make it more PG-13?

AM: I don't really think about it to be honest. I know that so many people are going to be reading it as well that he just has to join the fray really.

NP: At least he'll learn some decent swear words reading your stuff.

AM: Exactly. He's going to go to school, he's going to learn how to swear, he's going to learn dirty jokes and read pornography behind the bike sheds and do everything that everyone else has done, so really I'm not in denial that a fifteen-year old boy might actually come into contact with some of the nastiness of the world. I'm just hopeful that he'll have my sense of humor about it all.

NP: And swear well.

AM: Well, yes, that's the dream isn't it. You can always hope. [laughs]

NP: So one of the other things I noticed about the book is that it's got a lot of bloody pirates in there. It's a good job I'm partial to pirates post-Johnny Depp. What's that about?

AM: Well there's only two strips. Really, that book, it isn't just Tank Girl, it was all about everything that me and Jamie did in that time, but the majority of it was Tank Girl. We slipped in everything else that were collaborations that we did, like the Ginsberg, Stipe & Kerouac strip that went into ID Magazine, and various other ideas that went nowhere like The 16s, and good pictures. It was just trying to compile everything that was mine and Jamie's collectively because it just hasn't been seen in a long time. The main thrust of it is that Jamie has a lot of people who are very interested in his art, and there's nowhere to see that stuff, how it all manifested, how it all evolved. So I thought it would be an interesting anthropological exercise to put all that in -- plus it fills up the pages.

NP: Are you and Jamie likely to do anything in the future?

AM: Well, Jamie's main collaborations are with Damon and his music now, so probably not, but never say never. He's just off on a different trajectory at the moment. I know he doesn't want to draw comics, but I'm very much into writing comics, so I wouldn't say anything in the near future, but who knows.

NP: Is he cool about you carrying on with Tank Girl?

AM: Absolutely, he's really supportive. He just let me go wild with it. Said get in there and do whatever you want with it really. I think as far as he's concerned he's sort of washed his hands of Tank Girl. Unless somebody actually came along and said, "Right Jamie, do an animated movie of Tank Girl, here's a hundred million," I doubt whether he'd have any interest in it, and he might not even then.

NP: But it still smacks of a generous spirit doesn't it?

AM: It does, yes. He's been very generous indeed, just letting me run wild with it. I can't imagine many other people doing that, but, because Tank Girl was always such a free-for-all in the first place it would be difficult for him to try keep a tight rein on it, or just say no completely. The spirit of Tank Girl runs like a wild horse. It's untamable. I don't think anyone could try and nail it down.

NP: Did Jamie have anything to say about the return of Tank Girl when she was dressed like a librarian?

AM: He laughed at it all basically. That's one of my criteria, my goals with everything I do. My target audience is Jamie. I'm always thinking, "Will Jamie like it? Will Jamie think it's funny?" Usually I keep on a sort of even keel because that keeps her where she always was, because that's how we always used to work. He was thinking, "Will Alan like this?" We were both sniggering at it together. So when I write, I'm always thinking of my old mates and various Tank Girl fans, and predominantly Jamie. Will he think it's funny? And now Rufus as well, because Rufus has to sit there and draw the damn stuff.

The other thing that Rufus loves is the fact that I'm always a little bit behind with my scripts, so he never knows what's going to happen in the next episode. Whereas with a regular job he would get a synopsis, he would get all the scripts up front, he'd read the whole lot, and he's be bored before he was half-way through the first episode. But the stuff we're doing at the moment, he says he loves it because each month he just does not know what's coming next. It's like reading a comic, but very slowly because he's drawing it.

NP: It's funny you say that you get things in late, because I went to the new website and it said, "Coming Summer 2008," and yet it's autumn.

AM: We did have it up by mid-September I think, which is late summer. It's up now though. It's full-fledged now. It hasn't got the animation and stuff that we're planning to do on it but it's definitely there. So go and have a look, because it's blossoming into a nice site.




Thanks to the rather wonderful Rufus Dayglo for the exclusive Tank Girl illustration. Love n' pencils right back at ya!

Alan and Rufus will be doing an exclusive page a month of Tankie for Suicide Girls. The first installment will run November 2. Check back the first Sunday of each month for more.