Tank Girl: not at all male-gazey, like so many American superheroines
As a kid, I never thought of myself as a bookworm. Probably because “bookworm” is such an unappealing word. (Petition right now to change it to something much better, like bookdragon, or superbookhero.) After all, I did all the usual things kids do: climbed trees, fell off my bike trying to do wheelies, made up inventive nicknames for teachers behind their backs, ran away from bullies, tried to look cool to my friends by using some swear word even though I didn’t know what it meant, acted in school plays, baked a lot of cakes that didn’t rise, learned to shoot a pistol, got in trouble (those last two were not linked, honest).
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But secretly, like many only children, I also read anything I could get my hands on. Tucked up in my top bunk with novels by Dahl and Blyton and Aiken and Crompton and Willans; poring over Doctor Who and Rupert the Bear and Beano annuals every Christmas; spending hours sequestered in my room listening to my plasticky Walkman and devouring choose your own adventure books, wondering if I should add points to my strength or agility to defeat the Lizard King. And then there were Saturdays, when a pile of comics would be delivered and I would gleefully hoover up the exploits of Minnie the Minx and the Bash Street Kids and Judge Dredd.
Basically, I was 100% a bookworm.
And looking back, my favourite stories often had something in common – originality, eccentricity, an anarchic sense of humour, a sense of adventure. Luckily, these are qualities our little island does well.
As I grew older, like most teens, I started reading “the classics”, both in school and out. I wanted to educate myself, be a grown-up, have Deep Thoughts – when I wasn’t getting into trouble or listening to music too loud or thinking about boys, of course. But when I was about seventeen along came a comic called Deadline, featuring the most anarchic character of all – Alan Martin and Jamie Hewlett’s Tank Girl. And I reverted right back to the eccentricity of childhood and found my soulmate.
Although she was written and illustrated by two men, Tank Girl was not at all male-gazey, like so many American superheroines. Yes, she was attractive – but in a grubby, punk way, and she was also hilarious, drove a tank, and farted and picked her nose and swore like a sailor with a stubbed toe. In other words, although the whole world of Tank Girl – which was theoretically set in a post-apocalyptic Australia, though actually as British as Earl Grey tea – was out-and-out fantasy, Tank Girl was a layered, three-dimensional character busting with personality. She was real to me.
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Even better, for someone who spent part of her childhood and teen years in a deadly dull English seaside town full of grannies, Hewlett and Martin hailed from the exact same town. If they could come up with something as deliciously crazy and colourful while living in Dullsville, maybe I could too! Reading Tank Girl at 17, it felt like it was written just for me – sure it was set in a fantasyland, but there’d be odd little mentions of my hometown, or Pixies lyrics (my favourite band at the time) scrawled randomly under a panel.
Although I didn’t write anything more than angsty poetry as a teen, and wouldn’t write my first novel for many years to come, the seeds were sown. Hewlett and Martin – along with similarly funny and anarchic illustrated books like Molesworth and St Trinians and the Addams Family – inspired me. And when, as a grown-up, the first novels I wrote turned out to be funny, irreverent, somewhat anarchic kids books set in Hell… well, I think I know who to blame.
Tatum Flynn’s The D’Evil Diaries and The De’Evil Diaries Hell’s Belles are available from the Guardian Bookshop.