Tank Girl goes undercover and Sub Girl goes under the covers in this spy-thriller epic! With a group of lookalikes hogging the limelight, the team treat themselves to a vacation at one of Jet Girl’s numerous stately homes. But when they get the blame for the crimes of their impersonators, there’s only one way out – acting like a bunch of stupid secret agents…!

Don’t touch that! That’s my comic…

Tank Girl had trouble with an imposter not very long ago, in Two Girls One Tank, but there’s a sufficiently different angle in this one-shot escapade, entitled The Man from Tank Girl. This time the ‘doppelgängers’ aren’t very convincing at all – except to the gullible public and police force. The phoney Tank Girl sports a very obvious bald cap, while the man bumbling around in the Booga costume looks like an escapee from The Banana Splits! The bona fide Booga is worried that this will ruin his sophisticated image, but Jet Girl points out that with these pretenders causing havoc, mayhem and destruction in their name, it saves the real Tank Girl and co a whole lot of bother.

So the gang repair to Eyefull House, another of Jet Girl’s spacious country residences, and the first of several allusions to the James Bond movie series and the spy-fi genre in general. The basement of the house contains a hoard of old secret agent gear, including a custom-made car, the Alan Martin DB5 and a Half – see what they did there? Some of the vehicle’s features, such as its bullet-proof number plates and wheel-mounted machine guns, rival those of 007’s Aston Martin, while others, like the portable vinyl record player, are less impressive!

We even get to meet the car’s former owner: “The name’s Biggerstaff, Jamie Biggerstaff.” (I wonder whether artist Brett Parson minds these references to Tank Girl’s creators Alan Martin and Jamie Hewlett, when he gets no such name-checks of his own. It is the strip’s 30th anniversary year, I suppose.) Though he wears a three-piece suit, this spy is noticeably less well groomed than Sean Connery or Daniel Craig, his unkempt hair and unshaven chin looking more like Rhod Gilbert than Roger Moore.

As Tank Girl herself points out, it is a shame that she doesn’t get to use any of the car’s gadgets. Ultimately, The Man from Tank Girl is a mildly diverting adventure that will leave you stirred rather than shaken.

6

Richard McGinlay