Vol. 1: Extraordinary Machine, Bitch Planet

Bitch Planet is more of a collection of comics than a graphic novel. The story is one where women who are non-compliant are sent to live at the Auxillary Compliance Outpost, otherwise known as Bitch Planet. It's smart and snarky and feminist, and although the format isn't really my thing because I much prefer regular words on a page books, it's definitely worth picking up.

Part of me really loves or wants to loves *itch Planet.

Part of me is uneasy with *itch Planet.

It's feminism is intersectional but that doesn't mean it's not bull. Intersections and depictions are tricky, especially when you don't reside in the specific crosshairs.

I've seen white women mess up time and again. Sometimes things just feel iffy & I can't articulate it. This is one of those times.

If I saw more positive reviews from black women and a black woman at the helm of this production, my mind would be more at ease.

As it is, my fellow white women, stay vigilant.

As a comic reader: I loved the 80s art and style. The fake ads were clever and well used.

It's satire of the Juvenal pursuation. Taking the oppressive sexism to extreme futuristic dystopian levels.

I like the discussion guide in the back, how it names intersectional feminism directly taking the bull by its horns.

There is nudity but it's tied to the story & I don't think perpetuates the male gaze. BUT given it's majority POC and black women bodies, it's entirely possible I'm missing it as I've been inundated with media's problematic usage my whole life.

There is violence, institutional devised violence. I again don't think it's gratuitous but grain of salt.

As far as comparing it to Orange is the New Black: I've never seen it though I've heard all the high praise for it so I don't get the problem?

The future that bitch planet imagines is all the things I'm scared of :mysogny, forced subordination of women of all kinds and all for the benefit of men. There is a glimmer of hope, the megaton team, will this be a chance for the prisoners to break free or will they simply get themselves killed? I can't wait to read the next book and find out.

This is my first time reading this series and I'm riveted. The art is incredible, the storyline and pacing are razor sharp and the characters are deeply thought out and sensitively portrayed without falling into camp or shallow stereotypes. I zoomed through it in a few hours and will be devouring the rest!

Wow! Bitch Planet jumps right into it!

The story is excellent. The writing great. The art fitting. This comic is just freaking engrossing. It's the kind of book you don't want to put down.

And then it's over. Before you know it. And you want to scream "Noooo!" (For several reasons.)

The covers are delightfully retro. And the ads after each issue! Hey, Kids! Patriarchy!

But the best thing, of course, is the commentary on our society.

Women aren't as important as men.

Women are expected to be compliant.

When a man has an affair, the woman should determine what she did to drive him to it.

A bunch of middle-aged white men stand in judgment of everyone who's not.

Is this a future dystopia? Or just a mirror of our own culture? I guess that's the thing.

And the discussion questions at the end (yes! discussion questions on a comic book!) serve to highlight this excellent allegory.

Highly recommended. Unless you actually support the patriarchy. In which case you won't get this at all.

Received a copy from NetGalley for an honest review.

I really wanted to love this title but just couldn't seem to get in to it. I cared about very little when it came to the characters. They all felt like extreme versions of themselves without any soul. I can't even recall anyone's name that's how forgettable the cast was. Also, I don't really care about the political side the story, feels forced as can be. I did like some of the story points and some of the art was good, but I'm not really looking forward to another volume. I'll try it when it comes but for now Bitch Planet is a big old disappointment.

I thought this was a good twist on the theme of innocent people being imprisoned and exploited by the government as a way of keeping the rest of the population in line. Sort of Roller Ball meets Chain Gang Girls. Lots of action, lots of emotion. I really enjoyed the book and I'm looking forward to the next book in this series.

The only thing I wish about this comic is that they would reveal things a bit faster. There is still so much I want to know! If you love the dystopian future setting, and a whole lot of kick ass females, then you'll really enjoy this book.

Kelly Sue DeConnick creates a new look into a future that sadly seems more possible than ever before. The book reads like a 70s movie but that's not a negative. There is an overall story arc about a sport that gets a little too much attention. I wished there would have been more character development. The art by Valentine De Landro is a really good fit for the story. The book won't be for everyone but I really enjoyed it.

This series gets a lot of really great feedback, with good reason. It's engaging and shocking and leaves you wanting more. This volume is primarily character development and world-building, but I'm looking forward to picking up Volume 2 to really see the story unfold.

In "Bitch Planet" by Kelly Sue DeConnick, illustrated by Valentine de Landro, all women that don't match the patriarchy's standards are sent to a prison facility in space.

Violently, Aggressively Feminist

I'm not sure what to think of this. The whole book screams feminism and female empowerment. Usually that's a good thing, I love to read feminist books, but "Bitch Planet" takes it a little bit too far.

Instead of focusing on the story or the characters, the whole book consists of small snippets that hardly connect to each other. One second you're learning about a prisoner's past, the other you're thrown into a completely disconnected scenario featuring the prison facility wardens. It's very hard to get into this, it's hardly possible to understand what's going on without reading up on the story online. I had tremendous problems even getting the idea, because the writing is all over the place.

There are a lot graphic scenes and illustrations that convey female empowerment, but that's it. There is no story, no concept behind this, except all men are bad and the patriarchy needs to be destroyed. This a completely wrong approach and insanely frustrated me. This would have been a great read, had there been more effort put into the characters. There is no main character, everyone gets their five seconds of fame in about ten pages and then you're already off to the next story. I didn't get the point, I wasn't emotionally invested, I had a hard enough time even trying to understand what's going on.

Hindsight is 20/20

However, not everything about "Bitch Planet" is bad. The illustrations are stunning and the little advertisements at the end of each chapter are hilarious.

After finishing the book I felt like I understood a little more of what's going on and even could keep up with most of the characters. I feel like this is a book that you have to read multiple times in order to fully understand it and have the best reading experience possible. Of course, this is not the aim and you should be able to understand a book the first time around,

Rating:

★★☆☆☆

Overall: Do I Recommend?

The idea is awesome and super interesting, but the execution is one of the worst I've seen in a graphic novel in a while. It really hurts me to give this a low rating, but the execution is really, really bad.

I love Bitch Planet. A must-read for men and women who are tired of being told what they have to do to Comply, Bitch Planet uses sci-fi worldbuilding to turn its eye to the patriarchy. This volume comes with an excellent reading guide in the back, and I recommend that anyone read this. It tells the stories of the women you know in your life, and it will expand your thinking.

This graphic novel wasn’t anything you would expect from just reading the title alone. I received this piece as part of a Humble Bundle package and thought I would give it a try. It was interesting to say the least, and I think I would need to read and reflect on it a few more times to actually unravel all of the satire and metaphors that the author has imbued this book with.

This comic is a dystopia in a sense, representing a society in which a male chauvinistic culture has shown its worst face. Women are expected to conform to a certain mold, shown through forced stereotypical roles that women have been forced into during the story. While going to the extreme of sending women to another planet, where they are subjected to psychological and physical torture, DeConnick may be insinuating at a society analogous some cultures where women still have not experienced the freedoms they now have in the Western World. My other theory is DeConnick is extrapolating from the reality that women are forced to meet a certain “mold” in society. If they are “non-compliant” they are sent to “Bitch Planet.” This would represent how even Western Society still has not found a place for women who do not conform to our 1950’s housewife schema. Bitch Planet in this other interpretation represents a status we ascribe to non-compliant women.

It is unpredictable where the author is going to take this story following volume 1, but it is off to an excellent start. If you want a read that makes you think and reflect but is still entertaining and has great art, this is a graphic novel for you.

The women in Bitch Planet kick ass! I love them! While the series plot is still simmering (in a good way! I'm not sure what's going to happen next!), the characters are fully drawn and developed from issue one. This series features non-compliant women refusing to do what men tell them to do. It's great! If you want a kickass, feminist comic book--this is it!

Love the concept, but it’s executing it in the most crushing way possible. Just very upsetting. I know women throughout history have been and still are oppressed and this comic makes that fact feel even worse. I don’t want to see innocent women tortured, sexually assaulted and murdered. I get enough of that in the real world. Makes you sick to your stomach. I’d rather be empowered by a story, not reminded how bad things were/are. Eh... not for people who are sensitive to characters suffering in stories.

So the pitch goes something like, "OiTNB IN SPACE... also crossed with The Longest Yard."

I was really excited for this one, and as a representative piece of evolving comics culture, Bitch Planet is important. Bitch Planet is a strictly feminist piece of media, with a focus on patriarchal unbalance, featuring female characters of differing ethnicities, and sexual orientations. Rightfully so, an audience starved for this kind of diversity is eating this book up with a spoon.

Truthfully though, when you get down to the nitty-gritty, Bitch Planet really isn't all that good. Characters are flat archetypes (besides the prominently featured Penny Rolle) and the narrative is a bizarre mess that can't tell what it wants to be. We start with a poorly defined sci-fi world (which I guess is meant to be an alternate reality Earth-'merica) where men rule the world and are generally big ole bullies about it. The social commentary is done completely without subtlety, constantly drawing attention to itself with atonal jokes and sarcasm. The set-up seems obvious until our main(?) character is approached and asked to put together a Megaton (see Football) team of lady prisoners. Then we have a backstory issue out of nowhere, that's weirdly stronger than the rest of the book. All of this culminates in the dramatic(?) death of a character whose name had been said maybe four times prior to that point, and had just as many lines of dialogue.

I push this one over to two stars because the art was consistently good, and I ultimately didn't feel like I totally wasted my time with this book. I even smiled at some of the fake ads, even as they yanked me right out of the story.

Sorry everyone.

I tried to like this. Only parts I did like were with Penelope who is just a badass and I loved the parts were she was in the background starting riots! If she had her own comic book I would gladly read that. As for this one again I don't understand the hype.

This is my favorite thing being made right now. Bitch Planet is exactly what the world needs, Kelly Sue DeConnick is doing her part to save the world one comic book at a time. Bitch Planet had me excited from the beginning and filled me such a range of emotions. It is a call to arms, a call to action and it certainly got me inspired.

Great art, and an entertaining read. Bizarre story that is too often "on the nose".

Far-Left propaganda piece masquerading as an edgy cyber-punk tale. No asinine leftist politics or ideologies in my comics please!

When I was young; it was fun, mysterious, and diverse to be "punk". We wore tube socks and had chains. Today's message is your doctor has mis-gendered you and white men in suits are evil pigs.

I wonder if these propaganda pieces are even hitting their target audience?

Part of me is laughing right now. The part of me that hates life. Ever feel like a book is trying waaaaaaaay too hard to be edgy and political? Yep. I thought Bitch Planet would be fun and funny. Nope. Writer Kelly Sue DeConnick pretty much confirms every bad stereotype about what happens when a Tumblr feminist tries to write comics. Predictable. Dull. Painfully cliche. But I did learn this much, Kelly Sue DeConnick certainly does hates men. A lot.

You'd think a book titled what this is would be much funnier and way more fun than what's delivered here. Unfortunately, it's got all the humor of your uptight grandma if your uptight grandma took Margaret Atwood, Orange is The New Black, and Tumblr as their gospel truth. What sucks is that it brings down something that really could've been kind of fun. Instead, it's so little fun that I can't help but remember that Alex De Campi already did this story with more humor and a better implementation of the theme back in her Grindhouse series. So, if you think this is just a Sci-Fi Longest yard rip off, you're actually getting another rip off in the process. It's a steal.

Besides this book being really predictable, condescending, and racist (I'll get to that in a bit), I can say the visual teams were on point. Rian Hughes does some great design work on the book and on the covers. Certain areas seem like they were lade out be him. Valentine De Landro doesn't skimp on panels and adds a lot of character to what seems like simply taking it from the words...a pretty flat and one dimensional story about how all boys are evil and how white people are all evil including probably the women, which is comic since it's written by a white woman, has at least one white man in Hughes working on it, and there's a black man in Di Landro involved making the whole creative team evil on a gender or racial identity level.

I've been pretty down on this book and I'll say that at first I thought that it was me misreading the intent. It was really just a really preachy South Park episode. I then got to the back where it has a discussion guide filled with leading questions all related to the terrible writing and nothing to do with the spectacular teams that made the book at least look good. Instead, I get to see hilarious questions beating around the bush as to whether I check my privilege or not. Also, there's not a single non-white or for that matter white character that isn't a frankly offensive stereotype that if this book had been written by Bill O'Reilly wouldn't have been rightly called out. I'm mixed race and frankly I find the writer to be a exactly the kind of privileged racist woman this book screams about. Hopefully that'll make it into the next discussion guide.

*Disclaimer* - Don't put the title of this book in your review. the store will flag it. Hopefully, they aren't flagging it cause I'm calling out the writer for writing racist trash. Either way, I hate this book enough to go in re-post having removed the title. Hope this helps you the store. I still love you.