AUTHOR: ALAN MARTIN | ARTIST: BRETT PARSON | PUBLISHER: TITAN | FORMAT: TRADE PAPERBACK | RELEASE DATE: OUT NOW

This reviewer is a middle-aged man. As much as he might write about himself in the third person, he’s just had his fourth birthday starting with a forty, and he needs to accept the fact. Being a middle-aged man, he can remember the excitement when Tank Girl first took hold of the British comics world zeitgeist. He remembers the fact that second wave wasn’t quite done and still had the inertia to even bring change to the very male and potentially stale world of comics. And then the ‘90s brought Loaded and ‘Girl Power’, and the inertia ran out. And the decades went by. Even the most radical of young men at the time have since found themselves having to at least compromise a little with the decades that ensued and, as a result, we’re all finding ourselves a little bit Jet Girl.

So, as a middle-aged man, this reviewer was hoping for a shot in the arm of anarchy, a top-up of wild postmodernism and riot grrl fury and… and Action Alley wasn’t quite what he was looking for.

The story all holds together (it involves a road trip, Tank Girl’s ADOPTIVE mother, and kangaroos) the characterisation is consistent and, you know, ok, and the art, although it’s far from Jamie Hewlett in style, is genuinely pretty lush and really captures the look and feel of the characters and setting. But is all that the point of Tank Girl? There is a distinct lack of narrative anarchy, very little fourth-wall-breaking or obscure joke-cracking. For a good long while there’s not even much in the way of swearing (although this suddenly picks up at the end, as if the comic remembered it had a swear quota to fulfil).

All in all, although it’s written by Tank Girl’s co-creator, Alan Martin, it feels a little bit like Tank Girl by numbers. You might almost expect someone else, who wasn’t there back in the heady late ‘80s/early ‘90s, to be behind it, except that it feels (or maybe I’m just projecting) quite middle-aged. The story clearly quite likes its familiar old characters and doesn’t want to mock them too harshly or put them through too much suffering, and maybe even wants to give them redemptive arcs. The worst that can really happen to them is a spoiled holiday. As a result, the story is fun, but gentle fun, and not much more than that.

So in conclusion… this reviewer liked it, not a lot, but enough. But he sort of wishes he didn’t, that he was wild and radical enough to be frustrated by the lack of anarchy, by the dilution of the pure spirit of imminent revolution that he imagines fuelled both Tank Girl and him back in the day. But then, he is joke-cracking. What do you expect?