Bitch Planet No. 2: A love letter for noncompliant women

Kelly Sue DeConnick is a brilliant writer. But her work on Captain Marvel is often accused of pushing an agenda. It's not unlike the way race is brought up with nonwhite writers or queer theory with gay writers. Never mind the many straight white men who write straight white characters but are never accused of having an agenda.

"There’s a certain part of me that’s just like, 'If I’m going to take the heat for it, well … let’s do it then. Let’s steer into the curve,'" DeConnick told the Los Angeles Times in 2014.

That curve is Bitch Planet. It's a classy kiss-off to her critics. DeConnick's "agenda" is out in the open here. It imagines a patriarchal society gone wild. "Noncompliant" women who don't fit society's standards on body type, sexuality, or behavior are sent to a jail in space. On any scale, the comic is as fantastic as it is funny.

"Bitch Planet is as much Val's baby as it is mine," DeConnick told me, referring to her artist Valentine De Landro.

"There's a double-page spread in issue two. And one of the characters — I kept staring at her body type. It's something I don't see in comics," she added. "When we have a scene of them and they're all nude and it's nothing salacious or provocative about it. They're just so human. He just gets across the vulnerability."