Tank Girl and her merry band of miscreants are back, in the first of four brand-new, epic, stand-alone stories! In Tank Girl Strikes Again, our anti-heroes try to pull off their biggest caper ever – but, thanks to Booga’s gormless plotting, they barely escape with their lives. This is Tank Girl on true classic, chaotic, idiotic form…!

Time for a change of pace. Following a linked trilogy of four-issue mini-series (Two Girls One Tank, Tank Girl Gold and World War Tank Girl), this series, from the same creative team of Alan Martin and Brett Parson, takes the form of single-issue stories.

I didn’t find this opening tale quite as amusing as I usually find Tank Girl’s adventures. There’s some rather serious and nasty revenge stuff as the gang’s latest military-style campaign goes tits up, and their leader ends up at the mercy of the childhood enemy that she was supposed to be wreaking vengeance upon. “All I’ve ever wanted is to see you suffer a drawn-out, overly complex, excruciatingly painful death,” Ronnie Dosmond tells our already bloodied anti-heroine, before proceeding to pull out one of her teeth and then attack the side of her face with an angle grinder. You actually see it cutting into her cheek.

Offsetting the torture porn is the welcome stupidity provided by the presence of Captain Birdseye lookalike Bartholomew Anchor, Tank Girl experiencing a Bruce Willis moment in a ventilation shaft (“Die hard with a vest on,” as she puts it), and her posse managing to trace her by collecting tokens from the lids of breakfast cereal packets. The latter is in order to activate a free gift tracking device that Tank Girl had accidentally swallowed earlier… as you do. The team force themselves to eat their way through all the boring cereal (“I hate cornflakes,” moans Sub Girl, who’d rather have a bowl of Sugar-Frosted Coco Poos), even though they don’t actually need to do that to get the tokens!

It was worth eating my way through the less palatable parts of this issue to get to moments like that.

6

Richard McGinlay