Comics

Tankers by Bad Idea (2021)

Summary

The story opens in the board room of Greenleaf Oil in Texas, where the CEO has bad news for the gathered board members: The world has 50 years of oil left, meaning Greenleaf has only 50 years of profit remaining. However, the CEO has a plan. Using time-travel technology, the corporation will send a team of scientists and mercenaries to the end of the Cretaceous Period to delay the asteroid impact that killed the dinosaurs by 50 million years. That will allow another 50 million years for dinosaurs to turn into oil, expanding the world’s oil reserves and ensuring Greenleaf will continue to be profitable for centuries to come.

Greenleaf trains a small squad of mercenaries in weaponized mech suits—aka “Tankers”—and grants them a single request in return for their service. (One demands that the U.S. invade Cuba and turn it into the 51st state. Another wants to be the person who pushes the button when the U.S. next drops a nuke. “No thrill like it,” the CEO tells him.) The squad travels back in time, shoots up a bunch of dinosaurs, and uses a laser to divert the dinosaur-killing asteroid so it won’t hit the Earth for another 50 million years. However, returning to the modern day, they find the planet overrun by primeval jungle and gigantic, hyper-evolved dinosaurs. Texas and Greenleaf still exist thanks to a time anomaly, and while the CEO assures the squad that the disappearance of the rest of the world usually wouldn’t bother Texans, they now have no one to sell their oil to. So it’s up to the squad to once again return to the past and fix their mistake, but first they must fight off an army of very hungry super-dinosaurs.

My thoughts

Satire can be a hard thing to get right, and even when you do, there is no guarantee that your audience will understand the joke. At the time I write this, the 1997 film Starship Troopers has once again exploded in popularity, in part because of the Starship Troopers-inspired video game Helldivers 2, and in part because there are many online folks who take the film very seriously and don’t understand that it is mocking the source material and U.S. militarism. Tankers is very much a satire in the spirit of Starship Troopers, where on the surface you could read it simply as a story about macho men and women who gun down dinosaurs, but it is obviously poking fun at the protagonists and their motivations.

Tankers is a three-issue comic book series by indie publisher Bad Idea. As far as I know, a digital version of the comic was never released, and physical copies were only distributed to a small number of comic book stores. As noted, Tankers is satire. Start with the ludicrous plan hatched by Greenleaf Oil to alter the course of evolution, based on the myth that oil comes from dead dinosaurs. The joke is that rather than diversify their business or accept their company’s inevitable end, Greenleaf executives instead devote their corporation’s considerable resources to the harebrained scheme of changing history. If that wasn’t enough, many snappy one-liners should clue readers in on the nature of the story they are reading, such as when one Greenleaf executive explains that studies show that the world’s oil reserves will be depleted in 50 years. “Those are studies we funded,” another executive says. “Who knows what the real numbers are.”

Unfortunately, we never get to know any of the characters beyond broad stereotypes as the story is eager to jump into the action. The comic’s art is vibrant and often quite good but suffers from being too busy in the many action scenes, making it hard for readers to follow along. As for the dinosaurs, they are drawn competently and with more accuracy than in most comic books. Probably the biggest disappointment in terms of Tankers’ dinosaurian cast is the depictions of the reptiles in the alternate timeline where the asteroid was diverted. They are just larger, scalier versions of dinosaurs we already know, but with special powers, like a type of Stegosaurus that shoots spikes from its thagomizer. I would have liked more creativity in these alternate timeline dinosaurs, but Tankers isn’t meant to be taken seriously as a work of speculative zoology.

Tankers is a comic that I enjoyed more for its art and satirical elements than for its story. There are many funny elements, from the ludicrous plot to the sometimes clever dialogue. But the characters are flat and the action scenes are too chaotic for their own good. With more polish, this comic could have really shined, but as is, it’s just okay.

Trivia

  • Tankers was written by Robert Venditti, with art by Juan Jose Ryp and colors by Andrew Dalhouse.
  • Each issue ends with a shorter, unrelated story written and illustrated by different creators. The story in the first issue concerns a secret meeting attended by Abraham Lincoln late in the U.S. Civil War. The second story follows a Neanderthal man and his chance encounter with a cave bear. The third story is a satire of the private detective genre, involving an investigation into missing tokens at an arcade. I found the second and third issues’ stories to be the strongest.

Reviews

Published by

Walt Williams

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