Rub yourself down with The Cream of Tank Girl

The past few years have been very kind to comic book movies. Popular superheroes including the X-Men, Spider-Man and Superman have all found success at the box office. And just this year we've seen the likes of The Dark Knight, Iron Man and Wanted raking in mountains of cash around the world.

But it's worth remembering that things were very different back in the '90s. Again and again we saw Hollywood filmmakers doing their best to ruin fanboys' dreams with dross like Batman and Robin, Judge Dredd and The Shadow. However, while we can all agree that these were truly catastrophic pieces of cinema, none proved as ruinous as 1995's Tank Girl, a live-action abomination that not only killed any potential film franchise stone dead, but essentially destroyed the character's comic book outings as well.

For those who weren't following the UK comic book scene in the late 1980s, Tank Girl was the creation of art school students Alan C Martin and Jamie Hewlett and first appeared in a self-published comic in an advert for a forthcoming story that neither of them really intended to produce. This all changed when the duo were approached by the editors of Deadline, a new British magazine featuring a mix of comic strips and articles, with a strong focus on the UK's burgeoning alternative music scene. They thought that Martin and Hewlett's character was just what the magazine needed. And before long, a tank-driving, hard-drinking, kangaroo-shagging legend was born...

While Tank Girl has continued to have sporadic adventures in print over the past decade aided by a variety of different writers and artists. While many of these stories are still a blast to read, none really come close the original strips by creators Alan C Martin and Jamie Hewlett (the latter, of course, would later find fame designing the characters for the pop group Gorillaz and producing the Monkey-themed animated interstitials for the BBC's coverage of the 2008 Beijing Olympics). And it's those early days of Tank Girl's life that are celebrated in this wonderful new hardback coffee-table tome from Titan Books.

As with the original strips, Martin provides the words for the book, providing readers with an overview of the gestation of the character, her time at Deadline, her subsequent success in America, the live-action film and its aftermath. It's fascinating stuff, that leaves very few stones unturned and celebrates the strip's gloriously surreal heyday and the way it impacted on the culture of the time.

However, as good as those words are, the real selling point for fans is undoubtedly Hewlett's artwork. Every page unearths fresh gems to savour, from original page layouts to full cover art and even design sketches he provided for the feature film. More than anything else, it reminds you that behind the countless digs at pop culture, swearing and violence lay a genuine work of art drafted by one of the most gifted comic books artists to come out of the UK in the past two decades.

Whether you are a fan of comics in general of Tank Girl herself, you need to rush straight out and pick up a copy of this fabulous book. Not only does it celebrate one of the most iconic UK comic characters since Judge Dredd, but it also manages to transport you back to those innocent days when all a girl needed to have fun was a tank, a dim mutant kangaroo boyfriend and the opportunity to play strip poker with Feargal Sharkey. Bloody brilliant.

Titan Books, By Alan C Martin and Jamie Hewlett, £20 approx, On sale now
HCC VERDICT: 5/5