Bitch Planet Book 1

Bitch Planet Book 1: Extraordinary Machine, Kelly Sue DeConnick (Writer) & Valentine De Landro (Artist) – 2015

(As ever with comics, it's impossible to tell the level of collaboration that went into the book, so I'm treating the ideas and the writing as the accredited writer's, and the style and artwork as that of the artist's)

TRIGGER WARNING: Discussion of violence against women, misogyny and other things that may feel too relevant right now.

Satire and humour are not the same thing. A joke may be satirical, just as a satirical work may elicit a laugh, but the point of satire is that 'prevailing vices or follies are held up to ridicule'1. Though one may end up laughing at these vices or follies, satire should also provoke discomfort, anxiety and, if the 'prevailing vices' are bad enough, anger. Unfortunately, satire is mostly seen in the 21st Century as comedians making rude jokes about a politician's stupidity and getting a mixture of laughs and 'oohs' of appreciation from the audience that they dared to be so bold. In some publications, Private Eye being the main one in Britain, the humour becomes more complex, more vicious and biting. And then occasionally we find ourselves with a work devoid of all humour, save only the occasional, very bitter laugh, rough, ready and pulsing with frustration and anger.

With that said, lets look at Kelly Sue DeConnick's Bitch Planet: 

In the very near future, non-compliant women are shipped off-world and incarcerated for life in a facility that the Earth authorities label the Auxiliary Compliance Unit, but is referred to almost universally as Bitch Planet. 'Non-compliant' can denote a number of things, from too fat to too thin, too loud to too shy, too prudish to too sexual, too queer or too black, and those too defiant of the system. Amongst the newest detainees are Kamau Kogo, a black former professional athlete before the new regime began, Meiko, a nimble young woman of Asian descent, and Penny, a huge woman whose formidable size is made up equally of fat and muscle. When, on Earth, the President, now known as 'The Father', decides that view ratings of Megaton, the globally favoured sport, are dropping off, he decides that a team should be assembled from the ranks of Bitch Planet.
If much of the synopsis sounds familiar, that's because it is. DeConnick borrows liberally from classic SF, be it the concept of an off-world prison or the idea of the ruler of the world using the viewing figures of the world's principal sport to measure his control. Where Bitch Planet rockets ahead of its predecessors is in the use DeConnick makes of these tropes, the satiric nature of the material and the fire with which she writes. Satiric fiction can be a very difficult genre to sustain, as the audience's engagement can waver once the point is grasped, but DeConnick manages this by demonstrating in her varied characters, amongst them an athlete and a designer of spacecraft, the brilliance, the warmth and the genius that is cast aside and ignored, because it is embodied women that the male populace find unpalatable. She shows, seriously and humourlessly, how many women have submitted and adapted to be 'compliant', some even working directly as guards and agents of the regime and spouting their rhetoric, whether they believe it or not. In portraying the men of Earth, we see DeConnick is likewise subtle; rather than having them make grandiose bigoted statements about women, she demonstrates the insidiousness of the misogyny in small exchanges and everyday interactions, patronising questions and condescending remarks that are barely an exaggeration of what one hears in real life. One such example involves a man saying he will run something past his wife, and his colleague advising him not to mention that, because people 'might get the wrong idea'2. Though she only uses it sparingly, DeConnick also includes a religious rhetoric, which has been carefully adapted, seemingly by the regime, around the central idea of God the Father, in order to further the self-righteous justification of this ruling patriarchy.

A Guardian review of the first three issues decries the lack of polish and finesse, but this criticism seems to slightly miss the point; Bitch Planet is DeConnick's own raw, violent reactionary response to the zeitgeist, and nowhere is this rawness more apparent than in De Landro's emotive artwork. In De Landro's hands, the violence feels far more real than is normally found in comics; every punch thrown by an inmate has weight as it lands, and in each gut-wrenching instance of guard-on-inmate violence one can almost feel the blows fall. It is also notable that, though there is continual nudity, as prisoners both arrive nude and often interact in the shower where they gain the closest thing they get to privacy, none of it is remotely sexual, not even when characters are acting in an overtly sexual manner. The colouring, suggestive at all times of stark, harsh lighting adds to the atmosphere, whether to show the oppressive nature of the prison or, back on Earth, to imply the tensions within the patriarchal paradise, that are already placing a strain on it.

In the very recent political climate, stories like Bitch Planet are crucial and one only has to look at the resonance that it's had to see this. There is a symbol used in the comic to denote a non-compliant, which appears on all their prison jumpsuits and this insignia has now become an underground phenomenon, with hundreds of women getting the symbol as a tattoo. If reading Bitch Planet, or even my review of it, makes you uncomfortable: good*. It is not mean to be a comfortable read. Satirical far beyond any humour, gloriously, furiously feminist and blazing with DeConnick's own anger, Bitch Planet is unrelenting, uncompromising and, now more than ever, necessary.

*Kelly Sue DeConnick herself has done a wonderful talk about the importance of being uncomfortable, which I was a fan of even before I'd read her work. ttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZaxkgZ3eLak


Available from the good folk at Image Comics: https://imagecomics.com/comics/series/bitch-planet

1 The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, volume 2, Third edition, 1983


2DeConnick, Kelly Sue, Bitch Planet: Extraordinary Machine, Image Comics, 2014