ABSTRACT
Emerging in the late 1980s, Jamie Hewlett and Alan C. Martin’s Tank Girl became something of a feminist icon as her visibility quickly grew. A bounty hunter with a kangaroo boyfriend named Booga, Tank Girl was known for her haphazardly shaven head, sex drive, and effortless ability to outwit men. Although Tank Girl was (and still is) often presented in a highly sexualized manner for presumably male readers, she endures in part because of Hewlett and Martin’s inclusion of intertextual or metanarrative moments and other marginalia. Though these insertions initially seem like throwaway, self-deprecating jokes, their repeated use created space for ongoing dual, if not incongruous, reader responses, acknowledging male and female readers. To be sure, the Tank Girl comics are full of the male gaze, but the authors’ multifaceted approach encouraged feminist readings, securing Tank Girl’s status as a character larger than the world she inhabits on the page.
