Bitch Planet is a dark, futuristic satire about women in prison

With its deliberately shocking name and over-the-top imagery of scantily clad women fighting in prison, Bitch Planet looks like the comic book version of a 1960s exploitation movie. If you've ever watched Russ Meyer's classic flick Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, you know what I'm talking about. But this comic book, written by Kelly Sue DeConnick and drawn by Valentine De Landro (the two also co-created the concept), manages to do something unexpected. Somehow, by depicting sensationalized violence and extreme future scenarios, DeConnick and De Landro manage to tell a surprisingly subtle story about the dangers of political conformity.

Image Comics recently published the first Bitch Planet collection, Extraordinary Machine, which delivers a fairly complete arc while still leaving us on a good cliffhanger. The tale begins with a seriously creepy look at Bitch Planet, the isolated planet where "non-compliant" women are sent to "live out [their] lives in penitence and service." The prisoners are all tattooed with NC, for non-compliant, which has already become a popular geek tattoo in the real world. Mostly, the prison is run remotely from Earth by a team of wisecracking guys who deploy giant holographic women to order the inmates around and punish the inmates with stints in solitary where the wall screens are filled with mocking faces that tell the mostly innocent women how guilty and evil they are. Still, there are a few guards around to beat the crap out of anyone who dares to question how tight their prison garb is—and to murder some of the women for mysterious reasons. De Landro's art is both satirical and horrifically disturbing, and he's brilliant at including little details like ads or signs in the panel backgrounds that show us what this future Earth is like.

It's made of people

Slowly we realize that all this insanity is happening because Earth has fallen under the power of an authoritarian group known as the Council of Fathers, who rule with an iron fist but pretend to be kindly, priest-like elders. To please the Fathers, the Bitch Planet warden devises a scheme to enter a team of female prisoners into the "Megaton," a brutal rugby-like game that has become Earth's most popular sporting event. Indeed, the Council of Fathers requires all men to watch Megaton, because they believe this bloody, dangerous sport helps "exorcise" men's warlike urges so they can form peaceful political coalitions. Except, of course, the Fathers' rule is hardly peaceful. There are rigid economic divisions between men, and there are several scenes where we see powerful men humiliating and abusing their male underlings. Women, as you might guess, have no rights at all in this future. They are forced to become wives and mothers or eke out a perilous existence on an economic ladder where they can only ascend a few rungs from the bottom.

Like the hit Netflix series Orange Is the New Black, Bitch Planet has a large cast of characters whose life stories we learn about in the occasional flashback. A former sports legend and ruthless fighter commits an unknown crime and is forced to lead the Megaton team. A wife who gets angry when her husband cheats on her is sent to prison for non-compliance. A fat-and-proud baker who runs her own cake shop is arrested for talking back to some men who are making nasty comments about her body. A brilliant scientist, imprisoned for vague reasons, is hoping to use her knowledge of spaceship engineering to destroy the Council's transport ship. Though they're ruthlessly beaten and brainwashed, the NC women of Bitch Planet never give up. They fight, they figure out crazy schemes to get favors from the guards, and they try to use the upcoming Megaton match to overthrow the evil Council of Fathers.

The only way to win

As I said earlier, what's amazing about this comic is that it can somehow combine a naked ninja shower fight with nuanced commentary on political oppression. It's as if DeConnick has written subtle messages inside completely non-subtle ones. For example, it's glaringly obvious that this comic is about feminists fighting patriarchy. Or is it? A lot of the violent, sexual imagery in Bitch Planet is going to be offensive or triggering for many feminists. As I mentioned earlier, it's also a story about how the patriarchal Fathers oppress men, too. Basically anyone who doesn't conform to the rigid gender roles and morality of the Fathers is shafted. One could easily imagine a companion comic about the imprisoned men who refused to watch those state-mandated Megaton matches. Really, this is a story about how gender conformity screws everyone over and creates new forms of violence where none existed before.

Possibly my favorite subtle/non-subtle scene in the comic comes when the prisoner Megaton team is practicing for its first game. The women are great players, strong and agile, and they are playing against the mostly untrained prison guards. Naturally, the women start out kicking the guards' asses, until the guards arbitrarily change the rules in the middle of gameplay. They decide that it's OK for two men to tackle one woman, even though two-on-one is against official Megaton rules. As the women try to regain their lead, the guards change the rules again and again. The women start to lose, which the announcer claims triumphantly is because women are just too weak and undisciplined to play a manly sport like Megaton. Again, not subtle. But at the same time, this is a very complicated little allegory about sexism (and many other -isms) in situations where people are supposedly equals. There is no single, obvious way that the game is rigged. It's rigged in thousands of ever-changing ways, and people watching from the outside might never realize that the so-called winners are actually the worst kinds of losers.

Make no mistake—Bitch Planet isn't for everyone. It has nudity and strong violence. It's offensive in ways I'd never imagined, which is saying something. DeConnick and De Landro aren't shy about killing off characters you like and rubbing your face in cruelty. Basically, this comic has something in it to outrage everyone, from SJWs to Trump acolytes. And yet it's hilariously funny. It's gripping, action-packed, and (weirdly) emotionally realistic. It's the perfect story for a period in history when our real-life news headlines are full of violence and sports, politics and sensationalism. We live on an Earth that sometimes seems so absurd and off-the-charts horrible that you need a story like this to remind you that it could be worse. If we conform. If we are afraid to be non-compliant.

Listing image by Image Comics