Skip to main content
Bitch Planet is an uncomfortable title to ask for over the phone, given that 50 percent of it is an insult fortified by a millennia of sexism. But for the new Image Comics series, written by Portland author Kelly Sue DeConnick, whose magical-realist Western Pretty Deadly was nominated for an Eisner Award, an uncomfortable title is appropriate. Bitch Planet is set on an Earth where women who deviate from gender norms are dubbed "noncompliant" and sent through space to a prison planet.
Women in prison have, of course, drawn comparisons to Orange Is the New Black. But the prison world is even less hospitable than Piper's Litchfield. A doting Jason Biggs isn't waiting outside—some of these women's husbands had them sent to Bitch Planet. There are no dance parties, just brutal guards in Dr. Doom-like masks; a giant, pink hologram in a nun's habit and a bodice that demands their confessions; and a pair of wardens that control and quip over the action like a sadistic Statler and Waldorf.
"Women and girls are still raised to prioritize the well-being and comfort of everyone else over themselves," DeConnick says. "There is something very appealing to me about the metaphor of women in cages, women in boxes. Femininity must be defined in this particular way, and if you don't fit in this neat little box, then you are aberrant."
A fan of Japanese prison exploitation films, DeConnick says she'd been trying to put her own spin on the genre. "They would set up these salacious situations and put the viewer into the position of the predator or the abuser and only transfer that point of view at the point when the women would be allowed to get their revenge," she says. "I wanted to see if I could play with the exploitation trope and do it in a way that didn't make my tummy hurt." When she sent a list of ideas to illustrator Valentine De Landro, he latched on.
Though it deals with material that's certainly sobering, Bitch Planet isn't devoid of humor or life. "EAT MORE, POOP LESS," reads a sign at a busy intersection on Earth. True to its pulpy influence, that back page is full of mail-order items like X-ray specs and personality modifications. The art is visually striking: It's full of Lichtensteinian dots and bracing pinks and greens. At their "intake" to Bitch Planet, its newest prisoners float suspended in liquid, wires in their noses and light coming up from below, casting shadows on their wrinkles, curves, muscles and flab.
"I'm not sitting down
to write a flier," says DeConnick. "At the same time, I am certainly
sitting down to vent my spleen. I'm also of an age where if by not
prioritizing your comfort makes me a bitch, I'm OK with that."
READ IT: Bitch Planet No. 1 was published in December. Issue 2 goes on sale in comic-book stores Jan. 28.
WWeek 2015
