Jamie Hewlett: The Pencil Rockstar Who Redefined Visual Culture
Few artists have managed to impact popular culture as deeply as Jamie Hewlett. His irreverent and distinctive style took the world by surprise from his professional beginnings at age 20, when his creation Tank Girl catapulted as one of the most iconic independent comic characters of all time. However, this would be just the beginning of an extraordinary career that would reach its peak with Gorillaz, the revolutionary virtual band created alongside Damon Albarn, which radically transformed the world of music videos and inspired entire generations of visual artists.
In this journey through Hewlett’s fascinating career, we’ll discover how a young man obsessed with drawing managed to rise to the top of the creative industry without ever compromising his artistic vision. His story is a testimony to creative authenticity: drawing what he’s passionate about, exactly as he wants to do it. Join us on this journey through the life and work of the authentic rockstar of the pencil… Jamie Hewlett!
The First Strokes: The Birth of an Irreverent Talent
Jamie Christopher Hewlett came into the world on April 3, 1968, in Horsham, a quiet town 50 kilometers south of London. His father, a frustrated artist with considerable talent in his youth, had to abandon his creative aspirations to work in the family butcher business. Perhaps for this very reason, when young Jamie began to show an almost obsessive interest in drawing from an early age, his father became his greatest supporter, determined not to see his own story repeated.
Hewlett’s childhood revolved around two fundamental activities: drawing tirelessly and consuming all kinds of visual material that fell into his hands. He devoured comic magazines like Mad, where he was fascinated by Mort Drucker’s caricature style and Jack Davis’s expressive line. He spent hours hypnotized in front of the television watching cartoons, developing a particular obsession with Chuck Jones’s Looney Tunes, whom even decades later he would still consider one of his most important influences.
His adolescence as a boarder at Tanbrigde House School provided him with numerous opportunities to contribute illustrations to all kinds of school projects, while he continued to expand his universe of visual references. His palette of influences grew to include the art of Mike McMahon and Brendan McCarthy in 2000AD magazine, exploitation films, the bande dessinée of French master Moebius, the gonzo literature of Hunter S. Thompson, and the raw energy of punk rock. This amalgamation of disparate influences began to stir in his mind like ingredients in a creative cocktail shaker.
Upon entering Northbrook College Worthing art school, Hewlett discovered Los Bros Hernandez and R. Crumb among hundreds of other creative voices, thus completing an eclectic formation that would define his artistic sensibility. By then, his mind was already functioning as a unique visual kaleidoscope, absorbing everything and transforming it into something completely original that struggled to manifest itself on paper through his hand.
Explosive Friendship: The Collaboration That Would Change Everything
It was in Worthing where one of the most decisive encounters for his career occurred: he met Alan Martin, another student with ambitions in the comic world. The chemistry between them was immediate, and they soon became inseparable friends and roommates. The long nights sharing beers, records, conversations about movies, comics, politics, and alternative music forged a creative complicity imbued with the “do-it-yourself” spirit of the punk rock they both admired.
Motivated by this creative energy, Hewlett and Martin summoned Philip Bond, Martin’s close friend, and together they created Atomtan, an independent fanzine that compiled comics, illustrations, poems, and any form of expression they considered interesting. With clandestine access to Northbrook College’s photocopier, they printed 50 copies which they sold for 50 pence each in comic and record shops in Worthing. Would you like to explore the drawing fundamentals that allow creating impactful fanzines like Atomtan? Discover more here.
One of Hewlett’s illustrations for Atomtan, a publication that reached two complete issues, with a third announced but never completed.
Fate intervened when one of those humble copies reached the hands of Brett Ewins, an experienced 2000AD comic artist known for his work on Judge Dredd. After an initial chat at Northbrook, Ewins ended up spending several hours talking with Hewlett and his companions at a local pub. At that time, Ewins and his colleague Steve Dillon were preparing Deadline, an ambitious monthly anthology of comics with journalistic content about music and pop culture, conceived as a platform for new talents.
Intrigued by the overflowing creativity of the fanzine, Ewins invited the three young men to participate in his publication. Additionally, he specifically commissioned Hewlett to develop a comic based on a peculiar illustration he had seen in Atomtan: a sturdy woman with an outlandish hairdo, prominent breasts, eccentric weaponry, and an enigmatic name. Hewlett called Martin to collaborate on this new creation, and thus Tank Girl was born, a completely revolutionary comic that was destined to profoundly mark British underground culture and beyond.
The first appearance of the character that would revolutionize the British underground, in a modest pin-up from Atomtan that caught Brett Ewins’ attention.
Tank Girl: The Antiheroine Who Revolutionized Comics
Tank Girl represented a complete break from established female archetypes in comics. Rude, promiscuous, a hardened alcoholic, and a sociopath without remorse, she radically distanced herself from both the helpless damsels in distress and the hypersexualized superheroines of the mainstream. Nor did she fit with the delicate and sensitive protagonists idealized by many artists in the alternative circuit.
Drawing inspiration from his admiration for Jaime Hernandez’s Locas comics (particularly the rebellious rocker character Hopey), Hewlett and Martin created a deeply human character despite her absurd circumstances and even more ridiculous post-apocalyptic environment. When Ewins and Dillon received the first pages, they made a bold decision: the first issue of Deadline, published in October 1988, featured Tank Girl drawn by Hewlett on the cover, instead of some recognized artist or established character.
Their intuition was correct. Deadline quickly became one of England’s most influential publications, and at just 20 years old, Hewlett transformed into the most watched artist in the alternative scene. Master the techniques to create memorable characters like Tank Girl and bring your own stories to life here.
Page from Tank Girl’s first appearance, where the frenetic style and particular sense of humor that would characterize Hewlett’s work are already clearly visible.
Tank Girl represented a perfect combination of amateur vitality and graphic virtuosity, filtered through an absolutely unique sensibility. Hewlett’s stroke was frenetic, restless, and unpredictable, mixing figures of forceful realism with grotesque caricatures and endowing his characters with a kinetic energy comparable to that of cartoons. All this was imbued with a postmodern urban aesthetic and an unbreakable sense of countercultural humor that resonated deeply with young readers.
The success of Tank Girl catapulted Hewlett to the center of the English alternative scene. Deadline’s popularity among artists and musicians opened doors for him to collaborate with various bands, illustrating album covers for groups like Cud and Senseless Things. Among these interactions, he interviewed a young britpop band called Blur for the magazine. Although the encounter was somewhat tense, Hewlett would end up befriending the band and particularly its vocalist, Damon Albarn, a connection that would be decisive years later (although the relationship was temporarily interrupted when Hewlett began dating Jane Oliver, the ex-girlfriend of Blur’s guitarist).
Hewlett’s extraordinary eye for design turned Tank Girl into a fashion icon of the 90s, transforming her into a key element of the Riot Grrrl aesthetic.
Visual Exploration: Fireball and Constant Experimentation
Like many truly creative artists, Hewlett began to feel limited by repetition. In 1991, he reduced his Tank Girl production to focus on a new personal project: Fireball, a chaotic comic written by himself for Deadline. This series represented a delirious homage to Hanna-Barbera cartoons like Wacky Races, mixed with elements from The Cannonball Run movie, influences from Japanese manga and anime, and approximately two hundred other visual references that Hewlett constantly processed and transformed.
The premise of automobile racing not only allowed him to design dozens of extravagant vehicles and characters but also to experiment with the graphic representation of speed, action, and movement on the printed page. Deadline’s growing success made it possible to incorporate color pages in the magazine, and Hewlett took advantage of this opportunity to expand his visual exploration. Enhance your creativity and learn to experiment with color like Jamie Hewlett by visiting our platform now.
Clearly showing Brendan McCarthy’s influence, he produced pages of bright and strident colors, using markers, tempera, collage, and all kinds of materials to generate more vibrant and frenetic compositions than ever. However, true to his restless nature, he soon tired of drawing Fireball as well, and the series concluded just a year after its launch, while he redirected his attention to new creative challenges without ceasing to feed the growing Tank Girl phenomenon.
Color page from Fireball, highlighting the strident colors and creative use of lettering to generate visual interest and dynamism.
As his style matured, Hewlett and Martin constantly experimented with Tank Girl, altering the tone and format of the series according to their whims, incorporating increasingly creative lettering techniques, collage elements, and surrealistic approaches. The production was deliberately chaotic and spontaneous, free from editorial restrictions.
The work dynamic was so unpredictable that Hewlett frequently finished each chapter just hours before the editorial deadline, preventing editors from reviewing the content before sending it to print. Only upon receiving the finished magazine did they discover that the comic was becoming progressively more absurd and loaded with provocative material.
Although Tank Girl had become a countercultural symbol, inspiring fashion trends and protests during the last years of Thatcherism, Hewlett and Martin felt uncomfortable seeing how their antiheroine—now with tons of merchandise and even starring in advertising campaigns for Wrangler—was being assimilated by the very system they intended to question. Their response was to further radicalize the content, making Tank Girl something impossible to catalog or conventionally commercialize.
This Tank Girl page from 1993 shows the evolution of Hewlett’s style, with a greater emphasis on the sense of movement and more solid compositions.
Crisis and Reinvention: The Decline of Deadline
As the decade progressed, Hewlett’s popularity continued to rise, but an unfortunate setback nearly derailed his career. In 1995, after years of negotiations, MGM released a film adaptation of Tank Girl. Deadline strongly bet that this release would catapult the character toward unprecedented mainstream popularity.
However, despite Hewlett and Martin’s efforts to collaborate with the production, the film turned out to be both a critical and commercial disaster. This failure triggered a domino effect that culminated in Deadline’s closure in 1996. The creative duo tried to relaunch themselves with a new comic called The 16s, but they couldn’t find a publisher—partly because Deadline’s collapse was framed within a general crisis in the publishing sector—and they finally went their separate ways, with Martin opting to live in hippie communes for several years.
Page from The 16s, the last Hewlett-Martin team collaboration until their reunion for 21st Century Tank Girl in 2017.
After Deadline’s collapse, Hewlett was forced to reinvent himself to survive as an artist. He accepted some mainstream jobs for DC Comics, including a Tank Girl series for the Vertigo imprint with scripts by Peter Milligan, but this experience proved incompatible with the instinctive and free working method of such an idiosyncratic artist as himself.
While earning a living with advertising commissions (which he detested) and designs for children’s television programs, Hewlett embarked on a new creative project to keep his artistic spark alive: Get The Freebies, a chaotic comic co-written with Mat Wakeham, published monthly in the music and fashion magazine The Face. Explore unique resources to develop your own graphic narrative style like the one Hewlett shows in Get The Freebies.
Nominally centered on a couple of kung-fu expert detectives pursuing an outlandish criminal gang, the comic primarily functioned as a vehicle for Hewlett to mordantly criticize the society and culture of the time, with special emphasis on empty and pretentious media celebrities. Get The Freebies represented another dazzling graphic display by Hewlett, probably the most mature expression of his comic narrative up to that point, but it also failed to make the expected impact and concluded after twelve installments.
Hewlett’s style in Get The Freebies already anticipated some visual elements that would later characterize Gorillaz.
The Birth of Gorillaz: Visual and Musical Revolution
By 1998, Hewlett’s career seemed to have reached its premature sunset: a meteoric rise and fall in less than a decade. By twists of fate, after ending his relationship with Jane Oliver, he reconnected with his old acquaintance Damon Albarn, who had also just ended a long relationship with Justine Frischmann, vocalist of Elastica.
Initially united by post-breakup distress, they soon developed a solid friendship that led them to share an apartment in Notting Hill. In a short time, their home became one of London’s most exclusive meeting points, where the brand-new bachelors socialized with the elite of the British music scene.
The genesis of their most important collaboration occurred during an ordinary afternoon. Lying in front of the television, they observed with weariness the MTV programming, which at that time was dominated by boy bands and other commercial products of the music video era. While commenting on the mediocrity of the content, an idea emerged: if rock bands were doomed to be manufactured products, at least they could be interesting products and creatively stimulating.
Gradually, this casual reflection took shape until materializing in Gorillaz, a revolutionary multimedia project that would become one of the most influential cultural phenomena of the 21st century. Discover how to improve your character design skills in the style of the iconic Gorillaz members.
One of the first promotional art pieces published for Gorillaz, showing Hewlett’s characteristic visual style applied to this new project.
For Albarn, Gorillaz represented the opportunity to free himself from his public image as the “pretty boy” of britpop and explore more diverse musical directions such as hip-hop or reggae. For Hewlett, on the other hand, it meant a completely new challenge: telling visual stories in the music video format and developing his skills as an animator.
Drawing on the experience gained during the production of Tank Girl (which included some illustrations and animated sequences) and his deep admiration for Chuck Jones’s work, Hewlett designed the four members of the virtual band with simple but expressive lines, clearly defined personalities, and easily recognizable silhouettes.
As in all his projects, he maintained his creative process of merging diverse influences (notably Japanese culture and horror cinema), giving the characters absurd backstories that reflected his peculiar sense of humor. Hewlett’s meticulous approach to design always began with hundreds of small sketches, seeking to define the essential form of each character. For him, the fundamental thing was that the figure not only expressed the character’s personality but also was graphically interesting in itself.
When Gorillaz debuted in 2001 with their self-titled album, accompanied by three music videos directed by Hewlett and a massive media campaign, the success was immediate and unquestionable. The album sold more than 8 million copies worldwide and left an indelible mark on the imagination of an entire generation.
Storyboards drawn by Hewlett for the music video of “19-2000,” the second single from Gorillaz’s debut album.
Consolidation and Expansion: Gorillaz Conquers the World
Despite Gorillaz’s undeniable success, many critics attributed their initial popularity to the novelty factor of a virtual band, predicting that the public would soon tire of “songs sung by cartoons.” Hewlett and Albarn, who had conceived Gorillaz as a side project and were surprised by its repercussion, decided to demonstrate the artistic legitimacy of their creation.
They set out to deepen how to make their fictional band feel more “real” and closer to the audience. In this aspect, Gorillaz stood out as one of the pioneers in the creative use of the internet, attracting thousands of fans monthly to their website to interact with the characters and discover exclusive content in the early years of digital expansion.
Their innovative facet was also manifested in experimenting with CGI animation for the music videos of their second album, the multi-platinum “Demon Days” of 2005. Hewlett applied new technologies to his chaotic style to produce visually impactful videos that revolutionized the audiovisual language of the time. Want to evolve your artistic skills? Enter here to master techniques that you can apply in both traditional and digital drawing.
Hewlett’s designs are so effective that they work even when taken to hyperrealism, as seen in the music video for “Do Ya Thing” from 2010.
After “Demon Days,” Gorillaz consolidated as one of the most innovative multimedia projects in the industry. Their fame led Hewlett and Albarn to undertake a new creative adventure: invited by the Manchester International Festival, they traveled to China to explore the countryside in the north of the country and collaborate with theater director Chen Shi-Zheng, who was looking for a team to create an opera based on “Journey to the West,” a fundamental work of Chinese literature (and original source of inspiration for Akira Toriyama’s “Dragon Ball”).
The result was “Monkey: Journey To The West,” an extravagant spectacle that combined music, dance, and visual arts. The production not only toured Europe and the United States but also participated in the opening ceremony of the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games with an animated film specially created for the occasion.
Illustration from the poster of “Monkey: Journey To The West.” Hewlett adapted his style for this project, subtly modifying it to communicate adequately with different audiences.
The Authentic Artist: Creative Freedom as North
If something consistently defines Hewlett throughout his career, it is his unwavering commitment to drawing only what he is passionate about, letting himself be guided by his creative impulses and the natural evolution of each project. A particularly revealing example of this philosophy occurred during 2012, in the midst of a Gorillaz hiatus.
While enjoying a vacation in France, he developed an unexpected fascination with the patterns and textures of pine trees bathed in the sunset light. What for many would have been a passing observation, for Hewlett became a creative obsession: he dedicated three and a half months exclusively to drawing pine trees, touring the coast by bicycle in search of trees with interesting shapes to capture with brush and ink.
This ability to let himself be carried away by where his hand wants to express itself, combined with his constant change of materials and supports to maintain freshness in his work, is precisely what has allowed his art to remain relevant and vibrant throughout decades. Looking to free your creativity and find your own artistic path? Click here to access resources that will enhance your visual expression.
Majestic line work in one of Hewlett’s pine studies, demonstrating his technical mastery even in seemingly simple subjects.
The Legacy Continues: An Artist in Constant Evolution
Currently, Jamie Hewlett resides in Paris, where he continues to develop new projects for Gorillaz while maintaining a diverse artistic production both within and outside the band. His incessant search for new creative frontiers, tools, and forms of expression reflects the same overflowing energy that has characterized his entire career.
As a child, Hewlett discovered that his place in the world, where he experienced the greatest fullness and serenity, was in front of a sheet of paper with a pencil in hand. Decades later, although the materials and supports have changed countless times, his creative essence remains intact.
Hewlett’s impact on contemporary visual culture is incalculable. From Tank Girl to Gorillaz, his creations have transcended the realm of illustration to become cultural phenomena that have influenced fashion, music, animation, and design. His ability to continuously reinvent himself while maintaining an unmistakable style positions him as one of the most influential visual artists of recent decades.
For new generations of illustrators and visual artists, Jamie Hewlett represents a model of creative authenticity and technical versatility. His trajectory demonstrates that it is possible to achieve commercial success without compromising personal artistic vision, and that constant exploration is fundamental to remaining relevant in an increasingly saturated and changing visual world. Be inspired by Jamie Hewlett’s path and begin to develop your own unique visual universe by visiting our platform now.
