Something about the world today made me really feel like I needed some non-compliance in my life, so I decided to return to “Bitch Planet.” This month’s issue is not a regular installment of the series, but a good old fashioned three-in-one, featuring different stories from different creative teams. The stories were all wildly disparate, but they show how strong the distopia of “Bitch Planet” really is.
Written by Matt Fraction, Jon Tsuei, Basey Nyambi, Nyambi Nyambi and Eyang NyambiCover by Valentine Delandro
Illustrated by Elsa Charretier, Saskia Gutekunst , and Chris Visions
Colored by Nick Filardi
Lettered by Clayton CowlesEND OF STORY ARC DeCONNICK & DE LANDRO PRESENT: The Triple Feature! Patriarchy is the disease. We are the cure. Join the resistance with tales of appropriation, erasure, and feminist grannies…all with a healthy dose of backmatter. 100% Grade-A satire. Doctor approved, patient demanded.
The first tale, ‘Everyone’s Grandma Is a Little Bit Feminist,’ comes from Kelly Sue DeConnick’s husband, Matt Fraction, and Elsa Charretier. The story absolutely blew me away, featuring subtle shifts in tone every few panels until the inevitable twist ending. It’s the story of a girl bringing her Jewish fiance home for Christmas for the first time. What started as a Get Out-style horror show of microagressions quickly becomes an episode of the Twilight Zone when you realize who the real monsters are.
Charretier has done the odd Harley Quinn and Starfire story at DC, but her artstyle is a throwback to Bruce Timm. The cartooniness is completely incongruous with the creeping sense of domestic dread, but somehow it makes the story that much more horrifying. It’s like turning on your favorite Christmas cartoon, only to slowly realize something about it is off. Someone needs to revive “Batman Adventures” immediately, and scoop Charretier up to draw it.
The second story, ‘Mirror, Mirror’ is by Jon Tsuei and Saskia Gutekunst. It’s a story that’s sadly too familiar- an Asian actor and a white actor are up for the starring role in a martial arts movie, and you probably can figure out the rest. The story follows both actors very closely, and while both are shown in a sympathetic light, the sting of injustice is still very effective. Gutekunst has a very heightened style, but after the retro simplicity of Charretier, it feels practically photo-realistic.
While the story was extremely effective, I walked away a bit confused as to what it was doing in this collection. It doesn’t directly engage in the feminist topics the rest of the book deals with, nor does it take full advantage of the sci-fi setting, besides some nifty visual elements. The message seems to be that stuff that sucks now will suck in the exact same way in the future, which may or may not be true, but doesn’t cast any new light on Hollywood racism. The emotions are poignant, but it lacks the edge of absurdity that usually makes “Bitch Planet” so effective.
On the one hand, this story seems out of place. “Bitch Planet” is about injustice, but always in a heightened way. The main narrative is steeped in the conventions of exploitation cinema and over-the-top science fiction. A few holograms and flying cars aren’t enough to give it a sci-fi narrative element. On the other hand, such a divergent tone in the world of “Bitch Planet” extends the kinds of stories that can be told. From opening up the excellent letters page and backmatter (which you absolutely should), it’s clear that “Bitch Planet” means a lot of things to a lot of people. ‘Mirror, Mirror,’ shouldn’t exist in a vacuum, if it acts as a jumping off point for the expanded exploration of this topsy-turvy universe.
The final story, ‘Basic Bitch,’ is by Bassey Nyambi, Eyang Nyambi, and Chris Visions, and it combines cultural appropriation and police brutality into a a story of bad fashion choices gone horribly wrong. In the future when skin can be altered as easily as hair, a white woman decides to try being black for an evening. Suffice to say, she gets more than she expected.
The tone of the story is almost breezy, leaning heavily on contemporary slang (from “on fleek” to “AF”) that is evidently still popular in the far future. Colors bleed into each other, creating a nauseating churn of images. The words seem funny (at first) the images seem ominous and the story delves into darkness, then ends with an uncomfortable punch line that ties the whole thing up with a bow.
Continued belowWith an anthology like this, it’s usually hard to pass a blanket judgment, but every story had its own merits. While none of them matched up stylistically, that only helped to highlight each story’s merits. Overall, it’s going to be the first story that sticks with me, but that’s just me, and the point of having such a wide range of stories is that different things will resonate with different people.
The real message is that the world of “Bitch Planet” is more than the prison where the main story takes place. Handmaid’s Tale has become shorthand for “future distopia with way too much resonance in 2017” but really, it’s “Bitch Planet” that has the most acidic condemnation for the worst parts of our culture. Cultural commentary works when it can point out the ills in society, but it soars when it can call attention to the absurd.
Final Verdict: 7.3 – Three wildly different stories try to find the dark humor in terrible things.
