Bitch Planet, a prison planet, is a place for all misbehaving females. Females who are excised from the society before the cancer spreads. This cancer of non-compliance is abhorred and feared, and it's the kind of disease that isn't only the object of disgust for the males in the dystopian world of Bitch Planet, but also for some of the men and women in our reality. Bitch Planet houses all the problem-infested women who dare to be themselves and who should have been allowed to roam free on Earth, because they should be the future. In the shower scene, a reversal of exploitation tropes, their naked bodies are of different shapes and sizes, not objects of voyeurism or inhumanly proportioned representations of fantasies.

What happens when the Fathers try to evaluate and fix Penny, an obese woman whose ideal version turns out to be herself? She's happy with just the way she looks. The men are confused and disappointed. It can't be right. Obesity is a fault. It's a disgusting mistake, a malfunction, that needs to be corrected. It's not womanly.

It's not just about the men, though. Women have no trouble promoting a parasitic worm diet on television or judging the appearance of others based on predetermined beauty standards. They have no trouble reinforcing the idea of compliance and bowing down to everyone until you're a complete wreck under all the pressure of acting like you have no personality. The division between masculinity and feminity is deeply engrained in the society, and if you dare to jump out of your box of a servile woman who has no right to express her opinion unless it conforms to the norms, you deserve to be imprisoned.

Dystopia isn't usually my thing, but the neon-coloured shackled hand showing the middle finger sums up Bitch Planet perfectly (and the fake advertisements at the back of each issue are freaking hilarious). It wants to make an impact on how women evaluate themselves, other people, and the society around them, and it wants to make it loudly, but it also has a tongue-in-cheek attitude about it all.

It's a shame the plot doesn't fully come together and that the characters don't seem to have a lot of personality outside of the message they represent. The art and general atmosphere and energy hark back to Barbarella (1968) and 60s and 70s trippy B-movies, though, and that's completely fantastic. The exaggeration of gender issues works, because they're simultaneously so uncomfortably close to today's society that you can't miss the relevancy.

DeConnick's voice is a welcome addition to the comic industry, and it's amazing how a brand new comic has already inspired countless of readers to express themselves more fully and embrace who they are, supposed imperfections and all. For that, Bitch Planet deserves all the praise it's gotten and will get. I'm looking forward to seeing how the story develops in the next volume.