Bitch Planet is the best kind of fucked-up: a comic that entertains, breaks hearts and wields the power to change the way you look at the world around you.
Kelly Sue DeConnick writes something incredibly cruel in the first issue of Bitch Planet. Thereâs a scene in the comicâwritten by DeConnick, with art and design by Valentine De Landro, Cris Peters, Clayton Cowles, Rian Hughes, and Lauren McCubbinâwhere a remorseful older man demands his wife back after sending her to a prison planet. See, Bitch Planet happens in a near-future sci-fi society where men can ship women off the entire fuckinâ planet for ânon-compliance.â Non-compliance essentially boils down to not doing what men want and, in Mr. Collinsâ case, it involved not getting enough sex and arguing about the ensuing affair. But, after having had his wife shipped off on a spaceship to the Auxiliary Compliance Outpost (ACO), he had regrets and implores a middle-manager to bring her back home. And he does. Maybe these men arenât so bad, the reader thinks. Maybe this isnât so much of a dystopia, then.
But the Mrs. Collins who got snatched up is the cheating manâs second wife, the woman heâs starting a new marriage with. The first wife, Marian? She stays incarcerated on a distant planet. The husband who cheated on her isnât going to ask for her back. She doesnât get a happy ending. Wait⊠she does die at the hands of the inhumane guards on Bitch Planet, which is the closest thing to peaceful resolution a woman can get there. If you stay alive, youâre screwed.
When her survivors get listed, only Marianâs son is mentioned by name. She has a sister, too, but her name doesnât matter. Sheâs a footnote. The woman above being braced by the prisonâs condescending AI is Kamau Kogo, a former athlete framed for Marianâs murder. The prison powers-that-be are trying to blackmail Kamau into assembling a team to participate in reality-TV bloodsport called either Duemila or Megaton.
Itâs bread-and-circuses fare meant to divert humanityâs tribal combat urges away from any desire to upend the status quo. Megaton has been dudes-vs.-dudes thus far, but worried executives think that a battle-of-the-sexes match might be just the thing to goose flagging ratings.
The way that the creative team has imagined the bookâs primary characters manages to make them complicated individuals and cautionary symbols of the way that women are undervalued in modern society. So, while Kamau is smart enough to be deeply skeptical of the deal being offered, the system sheâs caught up in controls every aspect of her life. One way or another, she has to play along. Thereâs also a prison-escape subplot spooling out in Bitch Planetâs chapters and these moments tease readers with the instances where Kam pushes back against the strictures that bind her and the other women.
Everyoneâs trying to stay in the good graces of The Council of Fathers, the moneyed white men that rule the New Protectorate. So, yes, other women are complicit in the degradation of non-compliants (or NCs), as are black men. When patriarchal social norms fool folks into believing theyâre better off than others, thatâs just another way the system dehumanizes everyone. When one woman privileges her own position vis-a-vis anotherâlike prison guard Megâsheâs not thinking about the larger constraints that limit them all, which lets the terrible machinery chug along uncontested.
In Bitch Planet, the men who rule can be dumbâŠ
âŠbut theyâre still allowed to be in charge. Males arenât the main characters of the book but DeConnick still peppers in scenes that show them aggravated by the stress of trying to meet the macho-bro metrics of success.
So far, thereâve been five issues of Bitch Planet, which furthers the legacy of science-fiction that comments on humanityâs foibles and failings. The series succeeds because itâs ornery and sharp-edged, instead of being mournful or elegiac. DeConnick and crew quickly establish a premise built off of women-in-prison grindhouse films and slowly reveal elements of Bitch Planetâs characters and the world that the book happens in.
Take Penny Rolle, the giant who gets a solo spotlight in issue #3. In a world where women are prized for being skinny, light-skinned, straight-haired accessories for men, Penny didnât fit into a mainstream ideal. But she doesnât want to. When she lashes out against those pressures, she gets shipped off to the ACO.
If youâre deemed too much of a problem, you stop being a person. In fact, you donât even have to be a problem to have your personhood revoked. Society could just not want to look at you anymoreâlike if youâre âwantonly obeseâ like Penny Rolleâand, boom, youâre shuttled off to an existence that amounts to a living death.
But, as stacked as the odds are against them, Bitch Planetâs main characters refuse to submit or conform, because that too is another kind of non-existence. Not being allowed to live how you want, as you as are is its own sort of prison. Reading Bitch Planet can be a revelation that too many women are in this sort of solitary confinement. It doesnât comfort with imaginary victories or easy-to-swallow platitudes and goes a long way to illustrating why women might want to burn down a system that confines them.
