Bitch Planet might no longer be absurd enough to effectively comment on the state of sexism in America today.
The three-year-old comic book, from writer Kelly Sue DeConnick and artist Valentine De Landro, has always been an irreverent, zippy, and at times sorrowful satire and intergalactic allegory. The gist: A group of men hold all of the world’s power, and decide that women who are deemed “non-compliant” — through their actions, their looks, or their sexuality — are sent to a different planet, where they live their lives in jail and are forced to kill each other in a battle royal reminiscent of The Hunger Games.
But DeConnick and De Landro started writing and sketching their story at least two years before the United States elected a president who bragged about sexually assaulting women, before laws were enacted to keep certain women out of certain restrooms, and before President Donald Trump began taking steps to repeal the Affordable Care Act, which would impact and stifle the reproductive rights of women.
America’s current political climate puts DeConnick and De Landro, and other comic book creators and artists, in a strange position. Comic books, unlike albums, novels, or movies, tell continuing stories. Just like a television show that runs for several seasons, comics keep developing their narratives with each new issue. And if artists are inspired by real life, what happens to the art they produce? What happens to comic book artists and their comics when real-life upheaval occurs? What happens to a political comic book like Bitch Planet?
I chatted with DeConnick about these very topics as she prepared to travel to the Women’s March on Washington in January. Here’s what she had to say about her comic and where it goes from here, and how she absolutely did not see this coming. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Alex Abad-Santos
So I had planned to talk to you about how Bitch Planet felt like especially appropriate commentary for 2016, and now I think it might also be especially appropriate for 2017.
Kelly Sue DeConnick
Yeah. I know it sounds disingenuous, but I swear to God I didn't see this coming. It was supposed to be a comedy.
Alex Abad-Santos
I was always under the impression that it was kind of like a comedy with a twist of warning, taking big swings at stuff that exists in real life — the patriarchy, sexism, misogyny, etc.
Kelly Sue DeConnick
I mean, absolutely. Satire doesn't work if there's not a grain of truth there, right? It's taking things to absurdist levels in order to make your point, but I always felt like it was — I mean now I sort of feel like it's too subtle, you know?
Alex Abad-Santos
Indeed.
Kelly Sue DeConnick
I look at the way we structured it, and it’s almost more reasonable than some of the things I'm seeing bandied about, you know? Valentine and I were trying to walk a line between something that we thought was ridiculous but also plausible — the two touchstones we have are The Handmaid's Tale and RoboCop. So we wanted the kind of plausibility of Handmaid's Tale. Handmaid's Tale is chilling because it is so plausible. I didn't immediately recognize it as science fiction because it is so relatable. It just feels like 10 minutes down the road in the wrong direction. We wanted to have that, but also with the biting humor of RoboCop, because our inspiration came so much from exploitation films.
Alex Abad-Santos
When Bitch Planet was first coming out, I think you described the comic as the best part of the exploitation films.
Kelly Sue DeConnick
Yeah. We were trying to answer the question of, could we do exploitation films without being exploitative? [And our approach was,] “I don't know, let's find out!” I'm not sure it'll still work, you know? We weren't really trying to be a political warning; we weren't trying to make a statement other than to see if we could do these things that these films that we loved did, but do it from a feminist perspective and have our sense of humor come from that rather than from kind of a salacious setup that we then wag our fingers at. Good stuff like that. Then the world went to hell in a handbasket.
Alex Abad-Santos
How does that change the way you feel about the project now?
Kelly Sue DeConnick
We did have a talk about how, in the second arc, in particular with the backmatter [the part of comic books where the creators respond to readers’ feedback and questions and include notes and essays about the context of their work], we have drifted off course a little bit, and we want to course-correct. I think our plot remains intact. The tone is still roughly where it needs to be, but I think particularly in the backmatter, but a little bit in the story as well, we started to get a little preachy, and I don't want to do that. I think the backmatter should be for community building, and it should be for questions.
It's okay to have it be a place to vent your feminist rage, totally, but I don't want to pretend we have the answers. That is where I think we get off course. Sometimes we'll get a little too academic, and we also start to have this tone as though we have the answers, and I think what we have are the questions. I think we need to maintain a place of being the ones to say, “This is not right and this is not fair, and here's why,” not, “We know how to fix it,” because I don't think we do know how to fix it, and I don't want to pretend that.
Alex Abad-Santos
I'm going to ask a lot of comic creators this same question in 2017: I think with comics, more than any other medium, you can respond to the world in a much more immediate way. Comics feel like they’re faster on the recoil. Is it hard to separate the urgency of today’s politics from your art?
Kelly Sue DeConnick
Yeah. Okay, so we're the most responsive of anything except the web.
Alex Abad-Santos
Maybe music if someone’s just rushing a song out there, or some TV shows that film on a short turnaround?
Kelly Sue DeConnick
You can — it's rare — but you can go from script to shelf in three months. That is unbelievably fast, and you can go from script to shelf for a couple thousand dollars, too, which is unbelievably cheap. That is why — and that's one of the things I love about comics — comics are incredibly responsive for that reason. And comics tend to be weirder also for that reason, and that's another thing I love about comics. We don't have $19 million on our back and 18 levels of management weighing in on every decision to make sure no one's offended, you know?
But yeah, I think that comics are always going to be my first love for that reason ... because they can push boundaries, they can be very weird and they can be very responsive and they can be very experimental, and a lot of the most cutting-edge storytelling will happen there first. As far as whether I have done that, it's going to be hard for Donald Trump not to influence Father Josephson [Bitch Planet’s main villain] the character, although, hilariously, I think Josephson is far more articulate. He's a different character; he's a different dude.
Alex Abad-Santos
Bitch Planet’s villains seem much more eloquent than Trump.
Kelly Sue DeConnick
It's so set up, you know? It's really tempting, but at the same time the character is established, and that character is not Trump, you know? We already sort of know who Josephson is. How can I put this? I didn't want Josephson to be a mustache twirler.
Alex Abad-Santos
There’s definitely a seriousness about him.
Kelly Sue DeConnick
Even though we're playing with these archetypes and we're doing these really absurdist things, I wanted him to be that dude who thinks he's a good guy, you know? I mean, I'm sure Trump also thinks he's a good guy, but he's such a cartoon.
Josephson really believes everyone will be happier if they just do what he tells them. He really thinks his way is best. I mean, it's a literal patriarchy. It's this very condescending, good father kind of government, right? I'm sure I'm going to deeply regret having this out on Vox, but I don't know that I'd believe Trump believes he has everyone's best interest at heart.
Alex Abad-Santos
I don't think you're the first person to insinuate that.
Kelly Sue DeConnick
Yes, probably not.
Alex Abad-Santos
I mean, I find it fascinating, just from what you've said about how Bitch Planet is supposed to be absurdist, but now it's not all that absurd.
Kelly Sue DeConnick
I think if Trump starts a gladiatorial sport, we're in trouble, but right now we have that [feeling that what’s happening in the comic isn’t as out-there as it used to be], yeah.
Alex Abad-Santos
It's the attitude, though. What the villains say in Bitch Planet isn't that different from the vitriol you now see trolls saying on Twitter or in internet comments.
Kelly Sue DeConnick
No, and if anything, I think what we have in Bitch Planet is more layered, and that's a little heartbreaking. It's a lot of heartbreaking, actually. Yeah, I think on some level it's hard for me to conceive of the kind of unabashed racism, sexism, homophobia, a fear of Muslims — do we have a phobia for that?
Alex Abad-Santos
Islamo-, xeno-, all of the phobias.
Kelly Sue DeConnick
Oh, there we go. All of the phobias.
And just the anti-Semitism, like who the fuck knew Nazis were going to be back, you know? Like, for real, Nazis? That's a little on the nose, don't you think?
Alex Abad-Santos
Who knew? No one knew. That actually brings me to another question: In comic books, and you've seen this, and any female reader or any brown person who’s into comic books has seen this — for a long time there’s been this male, predominantly white rage that's been fighting against diversity in comics. "We don't want to see this; we want to make comic books great again by keeping things the same.”
Did you ever think that seeing that was like the precursor to something bigger? Did you have any idea comic books and video games were the precursor to this big political fight?
Kelly Sue DeConnick
Well, I mean we're sort of always on the leading edge of that stuff for the reasons that we talked about earlier, but I think it shocked me because I never thought we were trying to take anything away from anyone. You know, look, if you want to have your blowjob comic, you have your blowjob comic, and you go enjoy it — I'm not going to take that away from you. But I would like to have some comics out there that I'm interested in reading as well.
I did not understand that our presence would be a threat, but there are a lot of things that I don't understand.
Alex Abad-Santos
What can we expect from Bitch Planet going forward?
Kelly Sue DeConnick
We're not changing our larger storyline. The larger storyline is going to be what it was always going to be; it only gets more ridiculous as we go. My husband is like, "Don't do that, don't do that," and I'm like, "Oh, I'm so doing that," but it's going to be a little while before we get to [the mysterious arc in question].
The plan hasn’t changed. We’re still looking to do roughly 50 issues [total], 10 collections, and we need to pick up the pace [of publishing] or we’ll be 80 by the time we’re done. Who knows who’ll be president then? Maybe a woman. Madam President Honey Boo Boo or something.
We’re doing a Bitch Planet: Triple Feature book to pay forward some of the support we’ve had. Each issue will feature three eight-page, in-world Bitch Planet stories by creators that Valentine and I approached, with an emphasis on new creators, women, and people of color. Val will do covers, and the backmatter will be similar to what’s in the main title — an essay from me, guest essays, and community pages.
Our next arc, oddly enough, was supposed to be about propaganda, but now it's going to be about fake news, where I guess I'm being responsive. But it's the same story; we're just sort of shifting how we talk about it.
Alex Abad-Santos
That seems very appropriate. I'm laughing because it's hilarious, but also because if I don't laugh, then it's just really sad.
Kelly Sue DeConnick
What else are you going to do? I mean, at the end of the day, the book is supposed to be a comic, you know?