TANK GIRL: GOLD #3 Review - Warped Factor - Words in the Key of Geek.

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TANK GIRL: GOLD #3 Review

Tony’s coming over all poetical.


If Tank Girl has proved anything over the years, it’s that it can be, like many of the greatest geeky platforms, absolutely anything – it’s not wedded to a particularly tight chronology, or a style, or annnny sense of logic, or, to be fair, any damned thing else. Tank Girl has always defied definition, rules, and any attempt to pin it down.

Tank Girl Gold #3 is actually a very tender love letter from one member of the Tank Girl Gang to another.

Yes, that’s pretty much is. What should it be besides a very tender love letter?

Seriously, you might get tender-hearted and teary-eyed throughout an issue which begins with the words ‘Ain’t you beautiful? You cast a spell around the world just by being there.’

The panels and the pages continue, almost all in silence for a while, with just the occasional next line of the rhapsody delivered in lettering, as one member of the gang goes through their day – it’s a credit to the artwork by Brett Parson that he fills the pages with such seemingly mundane activity, while at the same time giving it the poignancy of a life lived in love, the ordinary day coloured brighter, made better because of the love of the other.

It comes as something of a bump to realise eventually that these two delicious, loved-up people are, being part of Tank Girl’s crew, preparing to go and drop both atomic and dirty chemical bombs on soldiers who are trying to stop their movie coming out (In the previous issue, Tank Girl and Co made a big-budget movie – yes, we know, oh the irony – in an attempt to blow through money like it was going out of fashion). Love, love, love, quirky details about the partner that even they don’t always realise, increasing the sincerity factor, now let’s go irradiate the fuck out of these army dudes, and get back to the whole love, love, love vibe while watching our movie…

It’s quintessential Tank Girl, this of course – if such a thing exists. It allows for the reality, the warmth of friendship, connection, human interaction between a tight-knit group, and turns its punky aggression outward in a seemingly mindless, semi-teenage display of anti-system violence and horror. Because, y’know, soldiers.

There’s actually at least a nugget of plot development in this issue – while en route to blow the soldiers to kingdom come, one of the lovers goes suddenly, oddly AWOL, a habit they’ve been developing more and more in recent issues, and the other, the one who’s been doing all the poetical rhapsodizing, fucks off the mission of destruction to follow their lover wherever they’ve gone. Tank Girl’s crew are not really down with the whole ‘Don’t bring your personal problems to the office’ vibe. For them, their personal problems are the office, they’re very often absolutely the reason stuff gets done around here, that lack of impulse-control giving Tank Girl its ‘absolutely any goddamned thing might happen’ edge of potential danger.

But mostly, this issue is a thing of beauty, with more poetry than an army of saccharine Hallmark cards, more nuance than a thousand desperate, take-me-to-bed Friday night ‘I love you’s,’ and more genuine, simple appreciation of one human being by another than any Hollywood rom-com.


Buy it now, read it now, and realise either what you have, you lucky, lucky people, or what you don’t, what you need, what the whole world of planes and tanks and submarines, of nuclear terror and official disapproval and the world’s plans to screw you over six ways from Sunday. It all comes down to lying with someone as they sleep, and seeing them the way no-one else can see them, not even themselves, and knowing that your heart is tied intrinsically to loving them. And then, if and when the moment comes, to following them off on a wild goose chase, just because they’ve gone.

Get yourself some Tank Girl Gold #3 today, and celebrate the fundamental nature of both love and Tank Girl. It’s worth the reminders of both and it wakes you up to what being alive is about, even in these alt-fact, what-the-fuck days.

Tony Fyler lives in a cave of wall-to-wall DVDs and Blu-Rays somewhere fairly nondescript in Wales, and never goes out to meet the "Real People". Who, Torchwood, Sherlock, Blake, Treks, Star Wars, obscure stuff from the 70s and 80s and comedy from the dawn of time mean he never has to. By day, he runs an editing house, largely as an excuse not to have to work for a living. He's currently writing a Book. With Pages and everything. Follow his progress at FylerWrites.co.uk

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