Bitch Planet #10

I'm woman enough to survive Bitch Planet! At least according to my father's messages all through my childhood!

I know I shouldn't be allowed to review Bitch Planet. This is the kind of comic book that you're only supposed to talk about in fuck yeah reverence. But I wasn't born with the part of the brain that can process reverence. I was, however, born with double the part of the brain that doesn't mind telling sexist jokes! Here's a sexist joke I once heard that I don't really get but the bro-dude who told it to me thought it was hilarious:

"What do you tell a woman with two black guys?"
"Nothing. You already told her twice!"

See? I don't get it. Who are the black guys? Coworkers? Maybe they were messengers who gave your message to the woman already? Oh no! I just thought of something. Maybe that guy was laughing because the joke was racist?! I mean, I don't know how it could be. Does it matter if the woman is white or black? Why does the joke specify the guys are black but doesn't specify the woman's race? Maybe I just don't understand jokes!

Anyway, I sure hope the big Megaton Jailball game happens this issue! I know the stadium still needs to be built but I'm sort of hoping that the same amount of time that passed between the publication of Issue #9 and Issue #10 is the same amount of time that passed in the comic book.

Luckily, Bitch Planet has a "Previously" section inside the front cover. Otherwise I'd never remember all of the pertinent details needed for understanding this issue.

The riot goes into the second act this issue. That's where the prisoners learn that beating up all of the guards doesn't exactly free them from the prison planet. Plus one of the guards captured Ex-President Doane and is taking her back to the prison control center. Kam, Mo, and Whitney go after them because they need the president to unite all of the prisoners. You see, some prisoners don't like other prisoners because some of the prisoners were born with pensises and, in general, the enemies are the ones with penises. But these penis havers are women too which is why they were sent to Bitch Planet when they got uppity instead of what happens to uppity (and maybe too feminine?) men who wind up being punched in the face and told to grow some balls and then maybe sent into the military where a bunch of penis peers could beat the shit out of them on a daily basis until they learned to "man up." Why isn't testosterone just called Jerk Juice?

This must be the part where she becomes more powerful than you can possibly imagine!

President Doane lives because Kam, Mo, and Whitney arrive in time to save her by killing the guard. Meiko's father lets them in the control center so that they can have complete control of the prison. I hope they don't forget about the Megaton game against the guards now that they've liberated the place. People are anxiously awaiting that spectacle.

Meanwhile on Earth, the Children of Eleanor Doane totally ruin the Protectorate Day Celebration. One of those children is the daughter of the Father of Media so she's hustled aboard the emergency shuttle with all of the other important people to keep them safe from the terrorists. Since she's a terrorist — or should I say rebel fighter? — she shoots the High Father in his stupid patriarchal head. It's like what's happening on Bitch Planet is also happening on Earth! Almost as if what's happening in one reality is also happening in another reality, wink, wink! I think I know what Kelly Sue is asking one of Sean Spicer's children to do!

That's how the first part of the comic book ends. There are other parts too! Like the page where Kelly Sue says some stuff and then the pages where some other person says some stuff and then the letters pages where lots of people say lots of stuff and then the back page where all the best stuff is ultimately said!

I'm not into thinking about things this week so I'm not discussing the material composed of lots and lots of words. Instead, let's just get a quick look at the best part of the comic: the back cover!

I'm pretty sure if I wrote DTF Fetus in any of my commentaries, I'd instantly lose half a dozen followers. I suppose that's the difference with seriously talking about them and sarcastically writing about them on a fake Woman's Magazine.

The Ranking!
No change! Come on! Where's the flippin' Megaton footsball game?! I'm seriously beginning to believe this isn't a lighthearted spoof comic about sci-fi sports at all!

Bitch Planet #9

Why is Bitch Planet advocating voting for Donald Trump?!

On the day after America decided to stop pretending it wasn't sexist (even though it wasn't pretending very hard to begin with), I'm not sure I should be allowed to comment on a comic book called Bitch Planet. I am far too flippant to discuss serious topics like imprisoning non-compliant women on planets located on the far end of the solar system! I don't think now is the time for jokes about women being disrespected! Okay, I'm guessing some of you immediately thought, "You fucking think there's a time for those kinds of jokes?!" Well, yeah! I do! The ultimate goal of equality is for everybody to be the butt of a joke without it feeling like an attempt to dehumanize and take away somebody's power! The ultimate goal of an equal society isn't that nobody is ever made fun of! It's that anybody can be made fun of in the current way almost nobody cares when white hetero men are the butt of a joke! I say "almost" because there will always be a few hugely butthurt white nerds tsk-tsking from the back of the room. I don't mean this next part in a mean or condescending way but in a way that needs to be addressed because it's important to why they feel picked on: they're usually non-teenage (and sometimes late teenage) virgins. Being an older virgin can make a person feel useless and unwanted, and the feeling compounds weekly. The anxiety of not getting laid turns into resentment, bitterness, and anger. They begin to feel they are somehow owed this right of passage. Women no longer become friends or coworkers or possible romantic companions. They become the enemy, withholding the most sacred of all life experiences. Not that I'm speaking from experience! Women have been totally throwing their vaginas at me my whole life, and sometimes their buttholes too! My teenage years were like a waterfall of poontang! I was always having to tell women, "No, no! Not now! The Birds and the Bugs will have to wait! I'm trying to eat my pizza rolls right now!" And they were always, "But my place aches! You know the place! The place where the doing it happens! Do the thing to that place!" And I'd be all, "Oh my god! I just totally burnt the roof of my mouth!" And they'd be all, "Oh yeah! Yeah! Say more of that dirty stuff!"

Man, I hope people believe my sexy teenage life stories! I mean, because they are true and they should totally be believed! Unless they were sexist and I shouldn't have told them! I told you I shouldn't be commenting on this comic book!

But how can I not comment on this comic book! It's so good! And totally tells it like it is but in a secret fictional way that makes some people think, "Can you imagine if the world were really like this?!" And other people are nudge-nudging each other behind the person's back and whispering, "How cute! They think this is an allegory and not reality!"

Ha ha! It's true! Men never lie! It's like they don't know how! Or are too stupid to!

It's been nine issues and so far the Bitch Planet Megaton Team hasn't even played a real game! I thought this book was going to be an exciting underdog sports tale! If The Bad News Bears had taken this long to get into the baseball action, nobody would have said things like, "The best baseball movie ever made that featured a drunk man driving around a car full of kids hanging out of his convertible!" Or this great review of the movie, "Never has a team full of spics, niggers, women, and Jews wormed its way into America's heart like the Bad News Bears!" That part with all the racial epithets is practically a direct quote from Tanner from the movie, so don't get mad at me! Get mad at the twelve year old white kid with the filthy mouth! Also, now that I'm thinking back to that movie, it took an awful long time to really get to the baseball. It really dragged on with that whole relationship plot between Buttermaker and Amanda! Why was that even in the movie?! So boring!

Oh! What I was going to point out was that it's almost time for a real game! All of the contracts have been signed and now they just have to build a stadium on Bitch Planet. And that probably won't take more than six or seven issues, right?! I wonder what the Bitch Planet team mascot is going to be? Probably a huge cock and balls with Band-aids all over it and a big black eye! Not to be confused with a big black guy's cock and balls! Although that would work too! Also it should probably be circumcised! Otherwise people might think it's just a big sea cucumber. Although it could wear a turtleneck with the team's logo on the front if it's supposed to be uncircumcised!

On Bitch Planet, things are going a bit upside-down. Makoto Maki, Meiko's father, has discovered she's been killed and has now taken over central command of the prison. He's also the guy who's supposed to design the stadium, so I hope he calms down and stops trying to upset the prison status quo! I want to see some Sportsgames!

Everybody is freed from their cells and a riot ensues. Meanwhile, Whitney and Kam have found President Eleanor Doane's cell. I don't know how much I'm supposed to know about Madame President since this comic book has some really long intervals between issues and my memory is terrible (although I still totally remember all of that doing it I did as a teenager! Except I did so much, I don't remember the names of all of my partners! Like the one from camp! Or the one on my vacation to Canada! Or the one you never heard about because she was a new kid who got suspended almost immediately! Or the one I met at the beach that summer who had to go back to Australia!). Was Madame President the president who was changing things that caused a white male backlash (some CNN reporters might call it a "white-lash" even though that doesn't make sense. It might make sense if backlash were actually "black-lash" (which maybe it is since pundits are always making up stupid words! Although usually those words just have gate on the end)) which created a world where women couldn't speak their mind without risking a jail sentence?

Poop is going down fast now! The prisoners in Facility One are going to mix with the prisoners in Facility Two and apparently that's bad news. Why? I don't know! Does the atmosphere combust when women and trans women enter the same room? That seems improbable! Maybe the "explosion" is just a metaphorical one!

Oh. That's the problem! Bigotry! Or misogyny? Anti-gender politics?! I don't know the right phrase for this kind of prejudice!

As the women begin fighting among themselves, Kam arrives and finds her sister Mo. Mo, having no idea Kam was incarcerated on Bitch Planet as well, flips the fuck out. But it brings everybody together and they stop fighting because of some speech about everybody being sisters or something. It's probably touching if you're into emotions and stuff. Plus Madame President shows up to unite everybody for rebellion! I hope the takeover of the prison doesn't mean there won't be any Megaton matches where the Bitch Planet team kick ass and take the title!

That's the end of the comic book section. But that's only half of the comic! The next half is full of words in different sections. It's the part of the comic book that makes you think even more than the comic book part of the comic book! And even though I hate thinking because it hardly ever leads to shots of women taking showers, I'm still going to read it all! The first part is where Kelly Sue makes a statement. This one is called "Content Advisory: I'm going to talk about Donald Trump."

Kelly Sue says some things about Donald Trump's "Grab them by the pussy!" statement and the way the news reacted to it. It's all very smartly said and expresses some of the problems I had with it too! I totally had all the same proper reactions. But she also mentions that sexy lamp she's always talking about. Where can I get one of those?

The next essay I won't have an intelligent reaction to is Rebecca Wanzo's "Superhero: Feminist; Superpower: Killer of Joy, Destroyer of Worlds". I probably got the punctuation wrong on that title because it's actually two lines and I didn't feel like making it two lines in this commentary, so I just threw in a semicolon. That's good enough, right?

The essay totally sums up everything I should probably be feeling and almost certainly do, especially right now after having read it. Although she says this one bit about not laughing at racist or sexist jokes and I couldn't help but get my feelings hurt and tsk-tsk from the back of the room. Also, why am I standing back here with all of these white male virgins?

The next session is a dialogue between Rebecca Henderson and Kit Cox called "An Empire of Tears: Male Fragility and Weird Capitalism". I can already feel my ego shattering!

In the dialogue, Rebecca says, "Being able to say 'No,' and not suffer for it, is basically the vision I want for the world." Can we get a Hallelujah? Also, her Male Tears pin is absolutely lovely.

After that is the letters! I hope there's one from a guy who doesn't get it!

There wasn't! Also, letters pages take a long time to read! After the letters is the lip glossary which defines intersectionality. I didn't read it because I already know all about different types of couches. So instead, I moved right on to my favorite part of the comic book: the back cover!

The back cover is worth the price of the comic alone! And you can read it right there in the comic book store! They give it away for free! Like a slut!

The Ranking!
+2! This comic is always good. It has so many opportunities to be good what with the cover and the inner pages and the back cover. That's a lot of stuff! Oh, and the essays too! And sometimes it even has naked women in it! But your Male Gaze isn't supposed to be titillated by it! So avoid getting a boner (or whatever the female equivalent to a boner is. A reverse boner?) or you're not a good feminist!

Bitch Planet #8

This comic book never fails to make me think deeply about things. Like remember how fun it was to give the head of a push broom a good spin to screw it onto the pole?

The Review!
Some people read this comic book because they enjoy the satirization of the Patriarchy via a model of women-in-prison storytelling almost exclusively used to pander to the male gaze. I only put the "almost" in there because I'm certain there must be some women-in-prison pulp literature that was actually written with lesbians in mind but was able to avoid being blacklisted or banned because it resided in the male gaze circle of the Venn Diagram of porn audiences. Some people read this comic book to feel empowered by its message of rebellion. I bet some people even read it for the essays in the back which seems weird because that's a lot of words to read for people who read comic books. I bet some guys even read this book to mock the women in it and cheer the men on to victory because women can't have anything nice without overly opinionated men ruining it by missing the point and twisting it into something demeaning! Fucking jerks! Now I bet you're all thinking "But why do you read it, Tess?!" because you're all astute readers who recognized that the structure of this paragraph was leading to a "but I read it for..." closing statement! Well, I don't want to disappoint all of you eggheads, so here we go! But I read it for the back cover! It's so brilliant! I always enjoy pure, unadulterated jokes alongside the knife twisting in the bloated stomach of the patriarchy!

Now you're probably thinking, "If that's true, why don't you just read the back cover while standing around like a knob in the comic book store?" Because I also like the story and the other stuff I mentioned! I even like when a guy writes a letter about how he totally missed the point of this comic book and tries to mansplain his reading to the creators and they answer by just drawing a picture of a dick or something. I don't know if they've ever done that but it would probably be a good response. Also I don't want anybody in my local comic book store to see me reading Bitch Planet. I have a manputation to maintain! At first I typed "mantain" but I thought that was putting too man a mant on man. Plus it just looked like a typo.

The Commentary!
This is the part where I don't take anything seriously and make fun of this comic book in ways that might be uncomfortable for people who automatically think everybody is sexist. So if that's you, you might want to find all of the other reviews for this comic book that are intelligent and thoughtful. This won't be that. And to prove it, my first scan with caption:

Other nicknames for Bitch Planet: The Kitchen; No Means Pluto; The Planet Where Nobody Knows The Minutest Comic Book Trivia And If They Do, They Probably Learned It From Their Boyfriends; See Where You Wind Up When You Don't Give Up Uranus; and The Place Where Nobody Knows How To Construct A Killer Magic The Gathering Deck.

I wonder if Bitch Planet has an orbiting moon where the men who guard them live. And I wonder if that moon wears a fedora?

The issue begins with women with penises being given health examinations. I mean, that's what the official word statement is! But why would I believe anybody in an official capacity? I'm sure they're doing something duplicitous, like simply using the idea of yearly health exams as reasons to abuse and humiliate the transwomen. Kogo (who is, according to the inside cover blurb, the woman responsible for organizing the Bitch Planet Megaton Team (I mention the cover said that because I didn't want to imply that I remembered it! It's been a long time since I read Issue #7, let alone whatever issue was the one where the idea for a league was bandied about (who is, now that I've read further, actually Kamau's sister whom Kamau Kogo is attempting to find. I should have realized that because "Morowa" is not "Kamau". Sometimes it pays to pay attention. Which is probably why the phrase is "pay" attention!)) mentions that Bitch Planet was originally created to send trans women who were accused of lying about their gender and being purposefully duplicitous. This is the part where a person of greater intelligence and empathy would remark on how this ties in to real world issues of transphobia and misogyny. But I'm just trying to keep myself from saying something insensitive! Not that I'm dying to say something insensitive! I just mean if this were about nerdy men, I would make any joke that came to mind and not worry about what people might think because we all know nerdy men have so much power that a joke at their expense is punching up. Although back in high school, that would have been considered bullying? I guess things are different now! It's weird how bullying used to be a consistent thing white male nerds had to deal with when nobody cared about bullying but now that everybody cares about bullying, it's still okay to bully white male nerds! Ha ha! Nerds! Serves them right!

I like to pretend that I'm not a white male nerd who plays Magic the Gathering and Warhammer. That way I don't get my feelings hurt when I make fun of them. I mean, of course I'm different than they are! I may have a beard but I regularly shave the neck area and I've never been tempted by fedoras! Okay, maybe there were those few years when Indiana Jones first hit the theaters but it's not like my mother was dumb enough to buy me one! She was all, "That's stupid and nerdy. You're already stupid and nerdy enough. Don't call attention to it, you dumby!"

Whew! I think I made it past the transgender thing without making any missteps by turning things around on white males! Unless the word "transgender" is now the wrong term! Shit. I think I'm supposed to just say "trans"? I definitely know better than to use the t-slur, even though while I was growing up, I thought that was just used for transvestites (mostly thanks to Phil Donahue). Not that that excuses using it, even if some drag queens think it's okay! Also, who am I, an outsider, to project my thoughts onto the person I'm looking at? It would be nothing more than a guess on my part if somebody were a transvestite, or a trans woman, or a woman, or a douche-bro who thinks his woman Halloween costume is totally hilarious? And why should I be guessing anyway? If somebody presents themselves to the world as a woman, they're a woman! Except for those douche-bros in the cheerleader outfits. They're just trying to get laid. Oh shit. I think this paragraph has all of that insensitive stuff I was trying to avoid! Abort! Abort!

Meiko's father learns that his daughter is dead when the prison tries to convince him his daughter is merely unavailable to speak and so they give him a virtual visit with his daughter. There's a clue in the way she plays the violin but I don't remember the Meiko issue well enough to know what it was. Probably something about how his daughter always shirked her practice or something. I'm sure it was very touching for those with a better memory than I have.

Meiko's father decides to flip the fuck out and destroy the facility. His first step is powering down the power grid. That gives Kamau and her new cellmate, Agent Whitney, time to run about the complex and discover Eleanor Doane in the most secretest secret cell on Bitch Planet. Eleanor Doane is some kind of feminist icon that maybe I should remember better but at least Kelly and Valentine and Kelly put in that scene in the beginning to remind me of Eleanor and how she's the focal point of a feminist rebellion back on Earth.

And although that's the end of the comic portion of this comic book, I figure it's really a book in five parts so I should allow for some room of those other parts. The first part is, of course, the comic book. The second part is Kelly's own words about the issue and being that I had a few comments on her words (and also that some of her words--in a more intelligent and earnest and less facetious way--mirrored some of my own), I should probably include her thoughts before vomiting forth a few of mine. I mean, you don't expect me to reprint a white woman's voice without shouting over it with my own male opinions, did you?!

This is all very well said and I don't even have a but for it! One thing Kelly expresses well, something I try to point out is the best part of white hetero cis male privilege (and using that description of me is not part of white hetero cis male privilege since most white hetero cis males will laugh at me for saying it and call me a girl!), is this: "I'm not going to do damage with any version of white male representation. We have an understanding that that character is only representative of himself; the humanity of white men is never in peril." That's a great synopsis of the best advantage of being a white male. We think of ourselves as individuals first and white or male second. That is as powerful as you can get in the privilege game of life. And those white males who lose themselves in fighting for white or male rights, or see themselves as victims whenever somebody takes a shot at whites or males? They're giving away the best power they were ever given. I feel sorry for those shlubs. They have it all and they choose to throw it all away because they'd rather, somehow, be seen as victims. But what they're really being seen as is ridiculous. Seriously. You had it all, white dudes! You had every day of your life to work on yourself as an individual! Society has never once told you that you were white or male before you were Bill or Kevin or Keith or Richard, you sodding dum-dum! Those mantears you cry which you hate people calling mantears? Those are tears of your own making! Your own choosing! That's why people make fun of them! Instead of whinging and wailing, you could be helping to make the world a better place. Hell, you don't even have to do anything to help make the world a better place, that's how fucking lucky you are! You just have to go about your normal white male business without worrying about anybody else! Simply by not worrying about it, you're doing less harm than going on the internet and crying about your illusory victimization!

Okay, so, you know, well said Kelly! Not just the thing about the males but, you know, the reason you said those things about males but your stuff about writing a trans woman and how you didn't want to fall into any of the pitfalls I probably fell into while writing about somebody writing about a trans woman!

The third part of the Bitch Planet experience is the essay. This is the worst part of the book because it is composed of a lot of words which, after you read them, you're supposed to think about them. Ugh! Thinking is so hard. Well, here it goes. I'm going to read it anyway! The essay is by Professor John Jennings and is called "Skin Cells".

Whew. That was tough! Professor Jennings describes the flip side of that bit I mentioned about how whites get to be individuals from the moment of birth. In what Kelly wrote and what I was expressing, I was speaking of their internal views of themselves. Professor Jennings points out the other part of that equation which is how other people view you at first glance. If a cop stops me, a white male, his first instinct is that I'm an individual and treats me as such. He leaves most of his preconceived notions behind, especially the closer I fit into his notion of how a "good citizen" should look. So probably white, well coiffed, nice clothes, a car that doesn't look in need of repair. You know, things that might suggest I'm "not poor". But for a black American, that isn't what happens. Preconceived notions fly into the window and crowd the officer's mind. As Professor Jennings states at the beginning of his essay, his black body is inscribed by society "with the visual language of discrimination, fear, and violence."

At one point, Professor Jennings uses the term Iron Maiden and I'm all, "Excellent!" I don't think that was appropriate to the subject matter. I'm a lousy student of everything.

Quote by Claudia Rankine used in John Jennings' essay.

Professor Jennings mentions how "terrifyingly amazing" that "Ralph Ellison's novel Invisible Man (written in 1952) could have been written last month?" And the same terrifying amazement is horrifically on display in his essay which, due to it being written and turned in for publication, ends with the account of nineteen police officers responding to Fay Wells' neighbors call to police when she thought Fay, a black woman, was breaking into her own apartment. If this essay were turned in this month, it could have ended with the account of Alton Sterling, or Philando Castile. And if it were published next month, Professor Jennings would surely be able to list many more.

The fourth part of the Bitch Planet experience is the letter column! Except this time there's an interview with the Feminist Sticker Club! So maybe Bitch Planet has more than five parts to the experience!

Oh wait! Maybe this is still part of the essay part because after the sticker interview, there's another essay. This one is by Mey Valdivia Rude, a Mexican-American trans woman, and is called "The Kind of Characters We Need: Hypervisibility vs. Visibility in Trans Representation". This one sounds complicated! And also one that I probably won't have anything to say about because I probably totally agree and don't need to disagree because it's one of those moments where I, as a white hetero cis male, should just go about my business and not interfere! Except to say all that stuff I already said about how I don't need to worry about representation because white males are already seen as not representative! Which is kind of the point of representation. Representation is needed to get to a point where every character is not representative of a group of people! It's almost a paradox! But once trans people are represented constantly and well in pop culture, trans characters will stop being representative of the entire community and will just become an individual trans character. Which means they can be total dicks at that point and nobody will be pissed off! Maybe I should have said "total assholes" because whether or not they have dicks is their own business. But we all have assholes!

And once this is well established, we can have super villain trans characters without any backlash! Right? Did I understand this correctly?

Okay, now I've finally gotten to the fourth bit: the letters! Nothing much to say here! Everybody was on their best behavior and writing in with positive, glowing responses. Darn it!

And finally to the fifth, and my favorite part, of the book: the back cover!

Ah! Such sweet and refreshing satire! So good! Wait. This was satire, wasn't it? Um. I'm scared.