JAMIE HEWLETT DESCRIBES himself as having 'a fairly cynical, negative view of the world'. No one scrutinising his work would beg to differ. The cartoonist created Tank Girl, the anarchic comic strip revolving around a belligerent, tank-driving outlaw in a Mad Max-meets-Metropolis wasteland. And then there are Gorillaz, the comic character-fronted band he created five years ago with Blur frontman Damon Albarn: a 'Zombie hip-hop' four-piece, who exist in a dark, unkind world populated by warmongers, mutated monkeys, dead planets and - as the title of a song on their new album Demon Days goes - 'kids with guns'.
Even his gloomiest self would never imagine how the apocalyptic visions he created on paper would come back to haunt him so vividly in real life - in the shape of the September 11 attacks, the Iraq conflict and the bombings that have struck fear into city dwellers and holidaymakers from European capitals to Egyptian resorts.
'It's a crap moment now, isn't it?,' says Hewlett, letting off a chuckle that smacks of anxiety as much as it does of stoicism. 'I think there's always hope - you have to have hope, but you can only do your best, can't you? I'm cynical, but if I let it take control I wouldn't be able to get out of bed in the morning. You have to look to the future - I have two children, so I have to look forward to something better.'
Hewlett might work on cartoons for a living, but his views on the world aren't seen merely through comical eyes. His battlelines - like his characters - have always been clearly drawn. Tank Girl symbolised more than just mindless anti-social ruckus - the lead character posed an upfront challenge to the conservatism of Thatcherite Britain. Now alongside Albarn - who has chosen to eschew celebrity culture and embrace peacenik politics - Hewlett pulls no punches in painting doom and gloom for Gorillaz' videos and artwork.
'That's the reason behind Demon Days - it's making a statement without being on a soap box, about the current climate that we live in, how you dress it up and disguise it with TV and advertising,' he says. 'We don't live in particularly nice times, do we? There are a lot of unpleasant things going on in the world, and our culture seems to be based around fast food and celebrity - basically just crap being thrust down your throat, really.'
This distaste for rampant materialism gave rise to Demon Days' intro, a piece that samples the soundtrack to George A. Romero's cult movie Dawn of the Dead. The film has added significance for Hewlett in the wake of the London bombings. 'It's my all-time favourite film because that in itself was like a statement our mayor [Ken Livingstone] was making about our culture and how we live - that we're just a bunch of zombies, walking around with our mobile phones and ignoring each other,' he says.
