Title: Bitch Planet, Vol 1: Extraordinary Machine Authors: Kelly Sue DeConnick (Author), Valentine De Landro (Author), Taki Soma (Artist), Robert Wilson (Author)(Artist) Publisher: Image Comics Rating: 5 stars
Blurb:
Eisner Award-nominated writer KELLY SUE DeCONNICK (PRETTY DEADLY, Captain Marvel) and VALENTINE DE LANDRO (X-Factor) present the premiere volume of BITCH PLANET, their critically acclaimed and deliciously vicious sci-fi satire. Think Margaret Atwood meets Inglourious Basterds.
Bitch Planet was a completely unexpected read for me. I’d never really heard of it before, which is a crying shame, and only picked it up off my library’s graphic novel shelf this morning. I am so glad I did. Bitch Planet is exactly my kind of read. Fiercely feminist, gripping, and subversive, I found myself totally enthralled just from the cover and the very first panel. I’m a latecomer to the graphic novel genre, but I find myself more and more impressed with each volume I pick up. The emergence of queer and feminist narratives through the medium of graphic novels is a surprising and welcome phenomenon. I’ve been finding many more non-hetero, non-white characters and themes in the GN genre than I do in novels, which has pretty much fuelled my forays into the comic breach. Bitch Planet reminded me very much of the wonderful novel Dietland (Sarai Walker, 2014). Dietland held many of the same themes; subverting the patriarchy, body positivity, and fierce female friendships. Bitch Planet, however, being in such a visual format, took those themes to a whole other level. The art was astonishingly impressive, and you could definitely feel the anger dripping off the pages.
My very favourite volume in Book One was definitely the origin story of Penelope Rolle, woman of my heart, my absolute favourite character. Penelope is black and fat and a woman and proud of all of them. She is intersectionality at its best. Penelope's origin story also had some of the best writing throughout the volume, I thought, not only in terms of positive representation, which was laced all the way through the novel, but also in the continuity of her dialogue. The repeated sentiment of "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" was dropped in at earlier points to reach a truly excellent climax in the moment of the self-ideal mirror, and we see just how happy with herself Penelope really is. That moment struck me so hard -- Penelope is truly my ideal mental state. I was also particularly taken with the old-fashioned advertisements at the end of each volume, and the viciously satirical content of some of them. They were such wonderful little plays on the actual crap that gets marketed to women, and marketed aggressively. For example, one of my favourite ads for a vaginal douche treatment: “What every girl should know: Your vagina is disgusting. It smells like the underside of a kangaroo pouch and he doesn't want to touch you because of the grossness. But thankfully, NEW brand douche, perfected by a leading gynecologist, gently cleanses and refreshes, making you feel feminine and special. Because what's more special than a vage filled with vinegar and chemical daisies? Also available in SPICY CINNAMON TACO, for the girl adventurer.”
I'm not gonna lie, this is almost word for word an ad I've seen before for 'feminine hygiene products'. Which is a whole other issue that I'm not going to go into now, except to say that it was wonderfully refreshing to see such a biting satirical take on the things that so often go unacknowledged, perhaps not because we accept them as gospel, but because we accept them as a stupid thing we have to deal with. This is why aggressively feminist publications such as this are so important, and it's equally important that they are read, so that women who might be silently despairing at the idiocy, and sometimes harmfulness, of the products being marketed to them can see that we all know absurd it is, and that we don't simply have to accept it as a fact of being a woman.
Okay, in terms of body positivity, the art was so cool. Fair warning, this book has a lot of nudity. A lot. And it really doesn’t hold back. But good on it! The depictions of women’s bodies are so realistic. Each nude body looked a little bit different from the one next to it, not perfectly smooth and formed and flat, and the actual existence of pubic hair was so nice to see!
As I'm sure anyone who has seen even a few minutes of porn (or gifs, or stills) knows that the fact that women do grow hair down there can seem like a myth sometimes. It's not a myth. Bitch Planet casually shows us that it's not. There's no burst-out panel with dialogue about bushes, but the mere presence of pubic hair on most to all of the female bodies featured is an accurate representation of what a lot of ladies look like -- and a fact which gets so little exposure in the mainstream mediums of storytelling, like TV and film.
(Granted, this is getting better, but there's still an abundance of waxed, smooth genitals in popular culture).
I was also highly impressed with the lumps and bumps and different looking breasts, because all women’s breasts do not look the same. Again, and this is starting to sound a little preachy, so I'll wrap it on up, but the visibility of the differences in women's bodies is just so important to produce and consume! I cannot stress enough how bizarre it is to see the same set of breasts on TV on fifty different women. So, wrapping up. The cliffhanger ending made me surprisingly sad (no outright spoilers, though), and I am hanging out to get the next book in the series. I’d highly recommend Bitch Planet to any and all who call themselves feminists, and everyone who pointedly doesn’t. This is an excellent insight into what it means to be a woman, and the fact that it's set in a sci-fi alternate universe where non-compliant women are jailed in a prison on another planet doesn't make it any less relevant to every single reader today, man or woman.