This is a comic for people who hate that they love action movies that have never heard of the Bechdel Test, or genre fiction that erases people of color. With no offense to Tarantino, Bitch Planet is a lot more socially aware of itself than Basterds, and the reality behind the tropes it's playing with. Within this kind of context-the exploitative fantasy and the grinding reality-Kelly Sue DeConnick and Valentine De Landro have to tread a damned fine line in their new collaboration: Bitch Planet, an updated, feminist sci-fi riff on the women-in-prison trope, officially described as 'Margaret Atwood meets Inglorious Basterds.' We're invited to watch YOUNG GIRLS IN CHAINS! BRUTALIZED! SEE WHAT THEY DO FOR THRILLS! SEE THEM IN ACTION! The trailers feature rape, whippings, shower scenes, mud fights, and tough girls breaking out of the prisons only to die in a hail of bullets. That decade saw the release of films with titles like Escape from Women's Prison, The Big Bird Cage, Caged Heat, The Big Doll House, Women in Cages, The Women In Cellblock 9, and The Hotbox. Shakur published her essay in 1978, in the heyday of the women-in-prison exploitation trope.

Little has changed for women in prison since Shakur wrote her essay, except their numbers: from 13,258 in 1980 to 113,605 in 2012. The drugs are the same and the system is the same. The fights are the same except they are less dangerous. Sick call is no different from the clinic or the hospital emergency room.

She goes on to describe the women who are in Rikers with her: overwhelmingly black and Puerto Rican, poor, drug addicts, survivors of abuse, survivors of a system that has marginalized and brutalized them.įor many the cells are not much different from the tenements, the shooting galleries and the welfare hotels they live in on the street. In Assata Shakur's essay 'Women In Prison: How It Is With Us,' written while serving a life sentence in Rikers, the author opens with these sentences: 'We sit in the bull pen.

Bitch Planet #1 by Kelly Sue DeConnick