Bitch Planet is everything you’d expect from a hard-line feminist manifesto. The writing, while good, is so heavy handed with the author’s message of demonization that it’s hard to believe that her fingers didn’t crush the keys when she sent them hammering across the keyboard.
Man, in this feminist dystopian future, has so fully expunged himself of anything even resembling femininity that he has even rewritten his own history and titled Earth as the father rather than the mother.
In this male paradise men can, with a few taps on an i-Pad and a healthy dose of lubrication in the form of cold hard cash (that’s still delivered in envelopes for some reason), have their troublesome, old, frumpy wives shipped off to another planet and even executed. Why this service isn’t done for free in the Patriaridise is beyond me.
The artwork in this comic, like the bothersome women we ship off-world, is flat, lifeless, and unimaginative. Don’t expect to be immersed in a fully realized reality where the full potential of such a compelling setting has life breathed into it. These are merely surface illustrations meant to do nothing more than carry the viewer’s eye from one word bubble to the next (don’t worry, there are no thought bubbles in this one).
Like members of the Tea Party clamboring to read Atlas Shrugged, hardcore feminists will delight in the self fulfilling prophecies trumpeted by their sisters in arms. A somewhat half-hearted attempt to make this comic palatable to a wider audience seems to come in the form of gratuitous violence. That violence doesn’t seem to be motivated by the plot or storyline. While it is intended to be a stand in for the male influence in the author’s world, I’d say it serves better as a stand in for the author’s own misguided anger.
Bitch Planet fails where so many other ideological works have stumbled, its creator has sacrificed the story for the sake of her message. more
By: Kelly Sue DeConnick, Valentine De Landro
Released: Dec 10, 2014
2014 Best Writer Eisner Award nominee KELLY SUE DeCONNICK (PRETTY DEADLY, Captain Marvel) and VALENTINE DE LANDRO (X-Factor) team up for the very third time to bring you the premiere issue of BITCH PLANET, their highly-anticipated women-in-prison sci-fi exploitation riff. Think Margaret Atwood meets Inglourious Basterds.