Summary: An unmissable must for Tank Girl fans of all hairstyles! Dark and nasty, We Hate Tank Girl is a bonanza of stories, posters, prose, and extras, featuring tales from Tank Girl’s past, present, and future, including the long-awaited Cut ‘n’ Dress Booga, and the never-before-seen bonus story, “Small Unit.” Collects Tank Girl One-Shots: Dark Nuggets, Dirty Helmets, and Hairy Heroes.
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We Hate Tank Girl, by Alan Martin and Rufus Dayglo 6.5
This collection of Tank Girl shorts is a more consistent one than the previous one, ‘The Gifting‘. At least this one provides a series of stories that more or less connect with one another:
This one mostly follows Tank Girl as she tries to figure out what happened to her while she was in the Army – after much testing and many experiments, the Army apparently managed to recreate her mind and also put out tons of clones of her.
What shall she do when faced with herself like that? Hmmm… I wonder: Destroy everything?
Well, at least it’s not a jumbled mess of unrelated items that don’t go anywhere and serve no purpose. It doesn’t change the fact that they were somewhat unsatisfying bits and were frequently too loose to make sense or feel complete. But it’s a start.
I’ve discovered that (at least the modern iteration of) Tank Girl is more about the cheap thrills than about coherence – so this book is totally par for the course. It’s just not fulfilling to me, that’s all. I wish there were more substance to it.
The artwork for this volume is all done by Rufus Dayglo. While I wish that he were collaborating with Ashley Wood (based on the few sublime works they did together), at least his work is more detailed, more fleshed out here than it was in the previous volume. Was it due to more practice? Or more time? Not sure, but it’s an improvement.
It doesn’t change the fact that I found the set far less appealing than ‘The Odyssey‘, and it’s certainly not nearly as funny. It’s a notable improvement over ‘The Gifting’ but it’s certainly not enough for me to become a fan of the series. I think that I need to go back to the originals, when Martin and Hewlett were both at the helm.
Someday, perhaps.