#238 Bitch Planet and the De-Centring of the “Traditional” Comics Reader

Editor’s Note: Graphixia is embarking on a series of posts about Kelly Sue DeConnick and Valentine De Landro’s feminist dystopia Bitch Planet, an excellent but also really important comics series from Image that offers a feminist reimagining of the women’s prison exploitation genre. You should read it. But you should also be aware that the post that follows, and likely others in this series, contain spoilers in order to offer full analysis of the series. If you haven’t read Bitch Planet, now is a really good time — there’s only seven issues out so far! — and then you can follow along with the series with us.

The most important page in Bitch Planet‘s run so far — the page that most clearly represents how and why this comic changes everything about comics for so many readers — is not a narrative page at all. It’s the first page of issue #6, “Extraordinary Machine” (also the name of the trade paperback), a flashback issue that fills in the backstory of Meiko Maki, a character who has died in the preceding issue.* The first page of this issue looks like this:

The first page of Bitch Planet #6 is a trigger warning about the central plot point of the issue: Meiko’s experiences of sexual exploitation and sexual assault, and the consequences she encounters when she fights back. This is a deeply disturbing comic, because though the representations of the crimes committed against Meiko are not graphic, they occur in situations where she is effectively powerless — one as a child, one as a prisoner — and in both cases her own violence, although enacted in self-defence, invites punishment that underscores the misogyny of the near-future world in which Bitch Planet exists.

That this issue begins with a trigger warning — a content advisory, as the comic labels it — is demonstrative of the title’s larger project of de-centring the “traditional” comics reader, presumed by so many people (most recently the troglodyte in charge of DC Comics) to be straight, white, cismen. As such, comics are typically written with that assumption and to that audience. Women, then, are drawn as sexual objects. Men are drawn as male power fantasies. White characters are foregrounded; non-white characters are sidekicks and canon-fodder. Heterosexual romances are standard set pieces, and cisgender narratives are the almost exclusive focus. Typically, even when a comic sets out to be inclusive of “non-traditional” comics readers, it bows to many of these tropes and expectations, often out of an explicit desire not to exclude straight, white men. Because we wouldn’t want to do that! Heaven forbid!

And then there’s Bitch Planet, a comic that explicitly de-centres the straight, white, cismale comics reader in favour of telling stories about toxic masculinity and the destructive nature of patriarchy through the experiences of women, and especially women not typically centred in comics: fat women, women of colour, queer women and, soon, transwomen. Women’s bodies are depicted nude but not necessarily sexualized; their stories exist not independent of men but in deep opposition to them; they are the protagonists and the most significant actors in each storyline.

I’m thirty-three years old, and I’ve been reading comics for as long as I can remember. Over the course of my life, I can’t even begin to imagine how many depictions of rape, sexual assault, and sexual harassment I have read, almost exclusively in comics using sexual violence against women as a trope that forwards the story of a male character. This is the first time I have ever seen violence against women framed in terms not of the perpetrator, but of the survivor. That’s the power of the trigger warning here — it explicitly tells me that the comic in interested in my well-being in a way that I had never before experienced. Even further, this trigger warning — with its assertion that you don’t need to read this issue to keep up with the story — places the reader’s wellbeing over the importance of the narrative. Typical comics values like completionism are utterly upended when we assert the primacy of the reader’s wellbeing over the integrity of a fixed narrative arc.

Obviously, cisgender straight men can be raped, and obviously this trigger warning works to their benefit also, centring their experience and foregrounding their wellbeing, too. It is not explicitly gendered, and in remaining open to all, destabilizes the narrative of rape. But consider that 1 in 6 women experience sexual violence in their lifetime, compared to 1 in 33 men (numbers from RAINN). This is a concrete demonstration that the default reader is reimagined by DeConnick and De Landro**: this comic is framed not for 32/33 men, but for 1/6 women. This interest in how the comic is received has a lot to do with the popularity of it, and also of the popularity of Non-Compliant tattoos among the comic’s largely women-identifying audience base.

It’s worth thinking too about how including a content advisory here is an explicit writing against the mainstream discourse around trigger warnings. Check out how Google finishes the thought “trigger warnings are…”

At one with the oppressor as always, Google. If you dig into those results, the loudest voices against trigger warnings tend to be the people who are least likely to need them: established, middle-aged, white, male, tenured professors, and the discussions are usually in relation to the classroom. We’re told they prevent students from being prepared for “real life,” unlike those 15 page close readings of Moby Dick that are completely relevant to everyone’s real life. I happen to think a student is more likely to do their best work if they get a heads up about difficult content and can manage their emotional world, but regardless of my views, it’s clear that DeConnick and De Landro don’t think these warnings are “bullshit, bad, stupid, ridiculous,” but instead essential to setting up a safe and inclusive space on the page to have some difficult and necessary conversations.

Bitch Planet changes everything for comics readers who have never been the primary audience for the work we love so much. By de-centring the “traditional” comics reader, DeConnick and De Landro create an inclusive space to discuss explicitly feminist issues. It’s a breath of fresh air, and it’s why this first page of Bitch Planet #6 took my breath away.

* It’s worth noting here that one of the great strengths in Bitch Planet is the creators’ willingness to interrogate their own choices. DeConnick includes a letter critiquing the decision to kill off a character of colour — such a common and exhausting trope in comics — and DeConnick meditates on that choice and its larger significance. This willingness to acknowledge dissenting and marginalized voices in the discussion of the work is refreshing. As another example, DeConnick reached out to trans readers for feedback on the forthcoming trans character — notable given the frankly terrible representation of trans people in otherwise celebrated comics like Y: The Last Man and Sandman. Again, DeConnick and De Landro force comics into a different kind of conversation than those with which it has traditionally been concerned.

** De Landro is not the artist on this issue (that’s guest penciller Taki Soma), but where the argument is larger than the layout of this individual issue I credit him because he is a co-creator of the series.

Works Cited:

DeConnick, Kelly Sue (writer) and Taki Soma (artist). “Extraordinary Machine.” Bitch Planet #6. New York: Image Comics, 2016.