Books like Tank Girl: The Odyssey

I enjoyed Tank Girl: The Odyssey immensely. That's all I can really say for certain of this very weird, very fragmented, comic reading... experience. It is an experience. A ride. A journey. An odyssey! If I had to pin down a core, recurring element of this wildly fluctuating spectacle of a book, it would probably be mania. Sheer, undisturbed, persistent mania. The book runs on pure energy, and doesn't skip a single beat in churning out joke after joke, gag after gag, scene after scene. The pacing is wild, the dialog skirts from being intensely sophomoric to providing high-brow, classical literature reference and observation at the drop of a hat, and the art, in Jamie Hewlett's recognizable, chunky, pop/punk style, is positively electric. If there's one thing Tank Girl has, it is, surprisingly, variety - though that variety all combines into a singular, very silly, very immature goal that ultimately comes off as far less ingenious than it perhaps actually is.It's a very particular 90s brand of juvenile hi-jinks - creative violence and swearing, along with cheeky parody, self-deprecation and allusions to popular culture, are combined with nudity, gross-out humour, farts, sex, and stinky, feces-smothered toilet humour, to creative a melting pot of everything society has ever looked down upon in comic books. It's all presented through the eyes of Tank Girl, a character I still, after reading quite a fair chunk of, can't pin down. She's either a punk feminist icon and hero, representing anarchy and sincere, shameless childishness... or, she's a cruel, self-serving parody of punk feminist icons and heroes, representing anarchy and shameless childishness by way of subtle, scornful, misogynistic mockery. I really have no idea. Her lack of respect for the core tenants of human interaction and society's rules of engagement are either to point out how cool that is (and it does look pretty cool), or to highlight how uncool it is (it also comes across as pretty dorky). To be honest, personally, while I hope she's a sincere attempt at progressiveness in female representation at this point, I think she could easily be the opposite. That would upset me deeply. Perhaps I'm employing a tad bit of wishful thinking.Ah, but is not pop culture what we make of it? And as Tank Girl has been wholly embraced by women the world over as a no-nonsense action heroine who follows her own destructive path, so too has The Odyssey. Tank Girl does what she wants, often at the risk of others - her stable of friends, Sub Girl, Jet Girl, and Barney, and a band of new followers, including a girl who is a sincere fan of her work, and three Irishmen who are not-so-vague and ever-so-unflattering caricatures of the three key creators of the book. They all have times to shine (her new followers, times to die horrifically at the hands of disturbing evils), and they lend a unique voice to the book that I find quite appealing. There's a dry wit to many of the jokes, with obvious gags often pointed out and derided within the gag itself; and the actual encounters the Tank Girl crew face are all so deliciously warped that they play out as a kind of vicious self-parody, so there's never really any legitimate tension - just guffaws-a-plenty, and a bit of action/adventure.The plot. Oh. For what it's worth, The Odyssey is a loose adaption of Homer's Odyssey (though, by admission of Peter Milligan, more closely mirroring Ulysses). Tank Girl needs to stop her kangaroo boyfriend, Booga, from signing a movie contract that would see him... well, I'm not sure. It's kept pretty vague as to why Booga signing a movie deal contract is in any way a negative thing. Tank Girl herself is fresh off of the "success" of her movie (yes, that movie), but she's in Ireland, and Booga is in Australia. So she rounds up her hearty crew and sets off for Australia. On the way they encounter danger and panic and shenanigans, from a pack of ravenous (and cannibalistic) film producers, to Tank Girl's dead mother who becomes very angry when Tank Girl fails to revive her corpse with magic farts, to their own selfish greed, to a hotel full of overbearing, religious zealot cyclops'. Who run a hotel. Called Cyclops Hotel. Those who recognize Homer's Odyssey will notice not just how similar Tank Girl: The Odyssey is (and pick up on the not-so-subtle analogs), but how strongly it insists on deviating from it, as well. Things just happen in Tank Girl, and The Odyssey is no difference. The jokes range from very clever, to very stupid, to clever in their outright stupidity (one cliffhanger ending sees Tank Girl stuck between saving her and her friends from certain death, or leaving a movie theater before the film is over, thus emitting a grievous social faux pas), and for every earned literary reference and ingenious little observation, there are twice as many dumps of utter inanity, designed seemingly to trip up the story from progressing, and confuse the entire flow of pacing. It's bizarre. Really bizarre.Obviously I enjoy Tank Girl: The Odyssey, or I would never have told you so in the opening sentence. As to why I enjoy it - or if I even should enjoy it - I really can't say. It does suit my bias towards clever approaches to stupid subject matters, it fulfills my daily quota of badass, anarchic women in comics, and it's so fast-paced and full of junk that there's never really a chance to reflect on whether or not the joke you just laughed at was worthy of a chuckle, or if it simply caught you off-guard in the searing sandstorm of lunacy. Either way, this is pure, unmitigated Tank Girl from start to finish, and if you don't know by now, you either love 'er or hate 'er. It seems I love 'er. Maybe it's because I'm Australian, and Tank Girl seems to embrace the best and worst of our deeply disturbed national attitude towards life ("I'm in hell!" Jet Girl protests, and, after Tank Girl explains they're merely on their way to Australia, she interjects, "there's a difference?") Or maybe it's just because of its unbridled commitment to reveling in its own ostentatious and joyfully idiotic filth. Either way, I love it - and I sincerely hope you can too.