The 16s is an unpublished comic strip created by Jamie Hewlett and Alan Martin in 1997 after the 1995 Tank Girl film became a critical and box-office failure. Alan Martin says that this strip had an influence on Gorillaz and has said that the comic "looks like the missing link between Tank Girl and Gorillaz".[1]
Background
In 2008, Tank Girl co-creator Alan C. Martin submitted a comic strip to BBC, that was created by he and Hewlett over a decade earlier in 1997. Martin stated that the strip had an influence on Gorillaz, saying that the strip is "the missing link between Tank Girl and Gorillaz". The example that Martin submitted was one of the 20 in total previously unpublished strips made for The 16s. The rest of the strips would later make an appearance in Hewlett and Martin’s Tank Girl retrospective book The Cream of Tank Girl.
Martin says "It was the final project that he and Hewlett would collaborate on “before we all ran away screaming after the Tank Girl film.”
Plot
The 16s is centered around the main characters Earl Monkey, Marcel, Barney, and Nutball. Barney is a character who’d previously appeared in Tank Girl, Marcel is an archetypal French man, and Nutball is a chameleon. The strip took place in an eternal Summer, always set outdoors. The 16s is Hewlett’s homage to The Peanuts and was named after a song by The Sweets called The Six Teens.[2]
Trivia
- A strip of The 16s was once viewable on Russel’s computer on the old Kong Studios website.
- Nutball would later make a cameo appearance on a can of spray paint being held by 2D in a phase one Gorillaz picture.[3]
- Earl Monkey has spikey blue hair that is similar to 2-D’s hairstyle.
- Jamie included strips from The 16s in his artbook in 2007.