This is Network, Sidney Lumet and Paddy Chayefsky’s 1976 film, nominated for 10 Academy Awards and winning 4 in 1977. Network is, to our eyes, as bleak as a film can be. Howard Beale, the frothing news-anchor responsible for the above speech didn’t have a happy ending to his tale, or even an effective one. The film spoke of and to a sense of an epoch of unopposed and potentially unopposable degeneration and degradation, and did so with cruel satire and unforgiving honesty. Over time, though the critical regard of the film has only increased, critical commentary has mostly been to the effect that the film functions as a retrospective of a despair that was quarantined to the era, capturing the zeitgeist of a time of tension now passed. Beale’s anger is seen as understandable but outdated: course-correcting with the immense social, political, humanitarian and economic progress brought on by the march of time.

The same year as Network was released, James Tiptree Jr – the male pseudonym of science-fiction writer Alice B. Sheldon – published “Houston, Houston, Do You Read?“, a story about male astronauts who wake up in a future where they encounter an all-female space crew. It won the Nebula in ’76 and the Hugo in ’77. The story confronted male readers with the posit that women could probably get along fine without them. Though parts of the story smack of gender essentialism, it is a powerful look at how even for “good” men, patriarchy underpins ways of thinking that are ruinous to the lives of women. Without giving you the ending – avoiding spoilers from thirty-six years past – suffice to say that the story like a lot of New Wave SF of the era has, for all its blunt emphasis, an assumption that ultimately things would be okay. Natural balances would correct themselves, as they always do, because progression away from injustice was writ into human decision making.

Feminism has been described as the world’s most successful revolution. Taking the long view, keeping a scorecard every fifty years over the last two hundred has shown continued improvements in the rights and conditions of women. For all the good of this progress, long term, incremental advances can lead to a belief that positive change is inevitable and those on the “right side of history” should be patient. Looking back from now to ‘77, the apparent truth that Network was fundamentally right, and that the themes (if not the setting) of Houston, Houston, Do You Read? was, at the least, over-optimistic.

There can be a sense, even amongst parts of the activist community, that the battle for social justice is being won inexorably, through a sort of moral osmosis or the diffuse benevolence of time’s passage . For all the ease that this approach might bring to day to day living, it’s hard to argue that many of society’s greatest ills – racism, sexism, class injustices – remain, and in many instances are progressively getting worse. Being “in the right” isn’t enough. Neat narratives of bad old days ignore the role of force, chance and will in play. There are forces that want to keep things as bad as they are, or make them worse, and there are things that won’t fix themselves without people thinking about them, and getting mad and doing something about them.

Enter Bitch Planet.

Feminism remains a cultural battleground, despite the assertion by some that it’s a spent concern. The intense backlash against the word itself is predicated on this assumption – that anyone calling themselves a feminist now wants too much because the equality that feminism stands for has “already been achieved“. It is, of course, a ludicrous notion. One only needs to look at rape prosecution statistics (or acquittals), or pay disparity, or nude photo shaming or GamerGate or listen to the experiences of women to realise that even if we’ve come a long way, we have many miles to go before we get to anything like equality – if we ever do.

We currently live in an era where aspects of the oppression of women are perhaps more subtle (in the democratic developed world), but are no less present. Modern discussions about gendered power imbalance often focus on this subtlety: the way in which the things that people don’t say, don’t acknowledge and don’t act upon ultimately inform the make-up of society. Subtle oppression is pernicious because it can easily feed into that narrative of past victories and a just present and it can happen without either its victims or its perpetrators realising that it’s going on. For some, behaviours are ingrained, and in acting unthinkingly in accordance with those behaviours, they enable or countenance harmful acts. That is the fundamental essence of the concept of privilege, in social terms: your freedom to not notice the things that are doing other people harm. The default assumption that because a certain thing is comfortable for you, it’s comfortable.

Bitch Planet breaks down the barriers of that concept. It doesn’t presuppose history is an inevitable march from ignorance to freedom. The comic certainly takes a glee with its highly colourful retrofuture aesthetic, but the work is anything but a camp frolic – this is, give or take, a possible world of the future, dealing with a very substantial concern: what if things get worse for feminism, for women and for society?

The comic blends the lurid and kinetic ‘Women in Prison’ subgenre of exploitation films (ala Concrete Jungle and Women’s Prison Massacre) together with the classic sf Prison Planet shtick found in everything from Dune to Adam Strange with ferocious abandon, to arrive at a fresh and pointed take – like the best dark satires, a deeply disturbing one because of how honest an assessment it makes of life today.

The key to Bitch Planet is that the steps it portrays as being taken are shocking, but they’re no different in their goals, or even their methods, to the forces that oppress women today. We don’t know the history of Bitch Planet’s universe yet. Its setting is clearly one in which the patriarchy has ceased to be a subtle force and become a more open one, but it is fundamentally the same force. Women who refuse to be compliant, who refuse to accept a subordinate role, who attempt to grow out of confining social structures are mocked, isolated, repressed and shunned by a system that relies on the collaboration of other women and men to suppress them, ostensibly on the basis of the oppressor’s interest. Bitch Planet lays this idea brutally bare, but it doesn’t invent it, or even significantly change it. It is metaphor, not hyperbole.

The prison setting has always been powerful because it is taboo – it touches on the dark places of our society, including the treatment of the incarcerated at our hands and the hands of their fellow inmates, the often contorted logic of sentencing, prison costs and what is criminalised. Here, the science fiction setting allows the creators to comment on a host of forces which underpin patriarchal ideas, from the law-enforcement system and the courts to organised religion. Without being heavy handed, the book conjures up the spectres of religious heads who force women back into bad marriages rather than “shame themselves” with divorce, of IRS inspections on single mothers who lose everything in a walk-out from an abusive husband, of educators who make social limitations part of their curricula and of the media who force women into “marketable” niches. We know the book isn’t out yet, so we’re trying to avoid spoilers. Suffice to say the story includes a brutal-gut punch of a moment that explicates its themes, but it also reflects them in thousands of diverse ways.

If you think we’re going on about the book’s politics, instead of the book, all we can say is that in many ways, the book is its politics. This isn’t to say that there’s no craft in the book – to the contrary, it is a remarkably clear and assured debut – but its craft reflects its politics because the issue is examined in both the story told, and the manner in which the story is told.

Valentine De Landro’s art goes well beyond the always-worthy achievement of reifying the ‘look’ of exploitation films onto the page. The women who make up the core characters of the narrative are representations of the female form usually given short shrift in the media, varied in body type and appearance, varied in their sexuality and power dynamics. There are pages featuring dozens of nude women, but they are never portrayed as sexual objects – even when their sexuality is raised. The harsh neons mix with the cold prison walls to create a jumble of disorientation and emotion, whilst still being clear in the events taking place, contrasted beautifully with sterile bureaucracy that we see outside the prison walls. Taken together, they create a wonderful sense that the “everyday world” is as stultifying and artificial as a 70s ad agency, and the psychedelic nightmare prison is the underlying reality. A metaphor that seems pretty clear when we’re talking about complacency.

The work is a first issue, placing theme and aesthetic front and centre. Leads, setting, plot – these are seeded, but it is left to future issues to cover the people we meet in depth. What we are instead presented with is a brutal snapshot story of the world and its issues, underpinned by Kelly-Sue DeConnick’s use of language – fully formed, and grip-your-seat great. In appropriating the “exploitation” genre, Bitch Planet takes advantage of one of its better traditions: it depicts the language of the dispossessed, even as it captures and reflects their understanding of the language used against them by privileged. The best of the “exploitation” stories have served as honest testament, exaggerated rallying cry and conscious reflection and that is certainly felt here.

It takes the confidence of top-of-their-game creators to thread this needle, and they carry it off with an electrifying sense of honesty in representation. In Bitch Planet, our leads are new but there is every sense that while these women might be the victims, they won’t be portrayed with the rough edges filed off to fit some idea of damsels in distress or exemplars of how the oppressed can prove themselves “worthy”. The prison is used not only to provide the book with a central metaphor about how women are treated, but also to ensure that the issues are not canvassed in either academic or idealistic terms. The authenticity of these voices echoes yesterday’s and today’s real victims of oppression – like the best of the exploitation genre, the book doesn’t allow the privileged to hide behind a “people like us” mentality, instead speaking directly for and to the oppressed. Beyond the presumed leads, there is a stand-out Pat and Mike routine often associated with prison guards in exploitation films which at once provides the book with a humorous chorus, but also comments on how mockery can provide distance and ultimately prove dehumanising. Even the title Bitch Planet is examined in the text, forced to make us think about how we use terms and slurs without allowing the dialogue to become even momentarily anaemic.

The downfall of many homages to exploitation genres – Sugar Boxx, say, or even to a lesser degree the 2000 “rema-quel” of Shaft – is that they realise the importance of the representation but are not necessarily concerned with the purity of their metaphors. The hope of progress, unfortunately, is often left by the wayside in the pursuit of retro authenticity. When we first heard about Bitch Planet, our expectation was that it would be a fun romp: a kick-ass recharging of the “women in prison” film, violent, humorously self-aware and outrageous – like most “revivals” of exploitation era fare. It is all of these things, but it’s more than that – it’s a blistering social satire with sharp enough edges to allow real truth to bleed through.

That truth is the future isn’t bright, or at the least isn’t necessarily so. As we write this, another police officer has escaped indictment for the killing of an unarmed black man. As we write this, the rich are getting richer, and the poor are getting poorer. As we write this, the earth may literally be dying. And as we write this, women are still being oppressed, and are being told to shut up about it.

These problems aren’t unconquerable, but their greatest ally is complacency. The shrugging of shoulders and the turning away of faces. The resignation to the fact that “it is what it is”. The first key to dealing with these problems, as it was in 1977, as it has ever been, is to acknowledge that they’re there and demand, from yourself if no-one else, that something be done about them. Bitch Planet is a comic which makes that demand, that wants to give you the energy and anger to end a malaise that lets things like this happen, while still inviting you to have a kick-ass time. It feels like the beginning of something special.

So first, get up out of your chairs, open the window, stick your head out, and yell “I’M AS MAD AS HELL, AND I’M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!”… then go grab Bitch Planet #1.