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

Image Comics

The covers of each comic are reminiscent of pulp exploitation movies of the 1960s.

3 more images in gallery

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 wise cracking guys who deploy giant holographic women to order the inmates around, and punish them 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.

Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments