But then Tank Girl got hugely popular, and had to be in every issue of Deadline. And her stories got reprinted first as comics issues and then as books, as if there was a coherent narrative through-line and consistent story to them all. But there wasn't. There never was in the first place, and the impulse to create one sent Hewlett and Martin even further away from narrative consistency.
It didn't seem to matter, though: the stories stayed popular, and a movie deal materialized. Even more surprisingly, the movie actually happened. Hewlett and Martin spent some time on set - in the American southwest, which may be one clue that an American adaptation of two very British guys' piss-take on a fantasy version of Australia might have been stretched far out of recognition.
These are the stories that came out just before the movie - the ones that know, in some sense, that there will be a movie - and are the height of that initial anarchic popularity. There was nowhere to go from here but down, and the reaction to the movie sent it all down very quickly.
The current reprint series of Tank Girl was recolored and reissued about five years ago - clearly, the series is still selling well, since it keeps getting reprinted and repackaged; books don't stay on the market if they don't hit an audience. But I think this is still basically the same material: a little nicer package, coloring that looks much more 2018 than 1993, a bunch of on-set photos from the movie and other sketches and ephemera to bulk up the package, but still the same core stories.
I read the first two Tank Girl collections right around the time of this most recent repackaging, in the previous (mid-Aughts?) editions: Tank Girl and Tank Girl Two. That first book is still the core Tank Girl experience: frankly, if there had never been anything else it would have been fine. That was A Thing, and Hewlett and Martin did it well. The second book is weirder and more random, which is fun in its own way, but about as self-indulgent as a thing can be.
Tank Girl Full Color Classics, Vol. 3: 1993-1995 reins in a bit from the pure randomness of the second book - perhaps someone pointed out to Hewlett and Martin that the movie was in-process, so they should do stories actually about Tank Girl most of the time, not their own childhoods - but it's still pretty nutty and random, with several stories in which a TG-looking person either wakes up at the end or appears once to comment on the action. They do all generally at least feature versions of the other main characters, though - Booga or Jet Girl will be the center of those odder stories.
I'm not going to describe the stories: they're mostly "Tank Girl goes somewhere, engages in loony violence while quipping, and then gets out," but there are many layers to that style, and one of the biggest ones here is random references to then-famous (or, even worse for this American, previously-famous) very British figures who are used as running gags or plot supports. There will come a time when a lot of Tank Girl stories require annotation for the average non-UK reader, and that time may be basically now.
I guess what I'm saying is that this is Baby Bear Tank Girl: the first book was hot, capturing lightning in a bottle, as good as these stories could ever be. The second book was very cold, going off in random directions and doing a lot of interesting things despite the massive self-indulgence. This one pulls back into the middle: it's more lukewarm, with plots that are mostly coherent for the length of their six or eight pages, characters who are mostly consistent, art that's always awesome but is occasionally cramped to get it all down on a page, and an eye on a bigger prize glittering in the Arizona desert.
It wasn't much of a prize, in the end. Tank Girl the movie was a famous flop on all levels. But that's how it goes, sometimes.
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