FREE SCI-FI COMIC: Bitch Planet
It is the near future and a literal patriarchy - the New Protectorate - has taken power. Women who displease the men at the top - the Council of Fathers - are labelled non-compliant (NC) and are punished. The worst offenders are shipped out to the Auxiliary Compliance Outpost, an offworld prison popularly known as 'Bitch Planet'.
Former athlete Kamau Kogo arrives with a new batch of prisoners. When fellow inmate Penny Rolle is struck down by one of the guards in an act of casual brutality she joins in the ensuing riot. The authorities note her fighting proficiency and decide to make her the new captain of the prisoners' Megaton team; a brutal sport televised for public entertainment and a source of revenue for the Bureau of Compliance and Corrections.
Welcome to Bitch Planet by writer Kelly Sue DeConnick and artist Valentine de Landro. If the 'F word' is something you find obscene you'd probably better stop reading now because this is feminism writ large. This is also a kick-ass, visually arresting action comic, however, so the reader is no danger of being turned off by the politics.
Of all the dystopias I have come across in science fiction, this one is somehow the most disturbing because it so close to the here and now. Depicted here is a society in which a woman's value is based entirely on her perceived physical attractiveness and her willingness to conform to the restricted roles that have been assigned her. Sounds familiar? It's the world you and I are living in right now. Sure, equality has come a long way since the days of the Suffragettes, but the old attitudes are still there in the background, like an ever-present hum.
Girls today are told they can be anything they want to be - BUT - there are still a million voices telling them they also have to be pretty, slim and not too assertive. A few too many pounds on you? Not wearing makeup? Not as young and pretty as you used to be? You no longer exist.
In Bitch Planet the non-compliants are women who are punished for disobeying the rules that tell them precisely how to exist. Those rules are now actual laws. This is a very unsettling 'what if' narrative...
In this fun-house mirror women of colour are even further down the social ladder and the pressure on them is even greater.
It's not all grim, though. Kamau (muscular and combat-adept) and Penny (very large and very recalcitrant) sure do give as good as they get from the masked thugs who work as prison officers, giving the reader plenty of opportunities to cheer them on. There is also plenty of very dark humour: the holographic matron with her various creepy stereotypical guises is joyfully macabre (think Big Brother in a corset and nun's habit)... Each issue also has faux ads after the fashion of US comics of the 1960s, selling such items as intestinal parasites to make you beautifully thin and Agreenex, a drug that makes you fashionably less argumentative with your man (We Get By When We Comply!)
De Landro renders the story with a bold, semi-retro style that includes the liberal use of Ben Day dots and jaggedly contrasting colour schemes. Every dramatic moment and gesture is starkly illuminated. The pages are on fire.
Kamau at first rejects the offer to form a team of prisoners to perform for the amusement and profit of the authorities, but some of the other women change her mind. Nut relishes the chance to be let loose to return some brutality against the guards. Meiko hints that the game may offer them an opportunity of some kind, thanks to inside knowledge that she has...
All is not as it seems here. How does Meiko know about the design of an incoming spacecraft? Is Kamau really a 'volunteer' prisoner? Who is the mysterious prisoner who has been in solitary for as long as anyone can recall?
In this high-security, insecure world it seems everyone has something to hide... But with events building up to an explosive climax, how long before those secrets are unlocked?
Zak Webber
Twitter - @sfcomicartist / Instagram - @sfcomicartist
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