Dirty Old Tank Girl

I’ve never really been interested in superhero comics. While all the other nerds were enamored with caped, masked, and do-gooders wearing utility belts, I was busy yukking it up with any scrap of trash I came across – fetishized violence, toilet humor, and neurotic talking rabbits to name a few.

The whole superhero thing is fine. I mean, I watched Saturday morning cartoons, I read Swamp Thing, and I collected action figures. But something kept these cartoons from really doing it for me.

What I wanted and what I needed was something to warp my little suburban brain, something to completely jangle me out of my life as a smacked ass pre-corporate stooge.

Enter Tank Girl and her consortium of rowdy weirdoes and ne’er-do-wells right through the big ol’ gaping hole punched in my angst-y teenage psyche by things like Cannibal Holocaust, Operation Ivy, Kurt Vonnegut novels, and cheap weed.

Anyone with a similar youth will get a kick out of Tank Girl’s new double feature.

Eschewing the more familiar quick goof, one shot, and episodic inanity approach, Dirty Old Tank Girl serves up two nice full-length graphic novels. “Carioca,” a reality TV send up, is the clear winner.

This long take is fun and offers a method of ingestion I don’t recall, save the movie adaptation. But there is something off, however, and I’m fairly certain the length is exactly it. Can’t win them all, I guess.