The best of the year: Vasily Shevchenko advises feminist comics
2015 IS FITTING THE END. It would not be an exaggeration to say that the year turned out to be saturated, including culturally. To dot the “and” and make sure that nothing important had passed by, we asked experts in various fields to tell about the brightest books, films, albums and other cultural events. In the third issue, Vasily Shevchenko, the owner of the Chuk and Geek shop and the founder of the Jellyfish Jam comic book publisher, talks about Kelly Sue Dekonnik, the most daring comic strip of this year, about a world populated by women.
Vasily Shevchenko
owner of the shop "Chuk and Geek"
If the 2000s were under the sign that the cool comics maybe not very brutal and not too gloomy, then in the 2010s, the authors discovered a female audience for themselves, and this is almost the best thing that happened to a stagnant medium. Now there are three main independent comics: "Saga", "Sex Criminals" and "Wicked + Divine", and all of them will easily pass the Behdel test. But all of them for several years. I was going to write about the delightful teen comics "Lumberjanes", but with horror I discovered that he was already coming out for the second year. But seriously, read it - it's like Wes Anderson is drawing a Gravity Falls comic with the girl scouts. Fortunately, it was in 2015 that the new comic Kelly Sue Deconnik "Bitch Planet" started.
"Bitch Planet" is literally about the world of women. Because in the near future, all orderbreakers are referred to a distant planet, which is called the Planet Suchek. There, a team of prisoners is forced to participate in megaton competitions - an even more brutal version of American football, where only men traditionally played. In the first five episodes, they only manage to do one workout, but even before that there are enough steep plot twists. And most importantly - the atmosphere of the whole comic. Dekonnik and artist Valentin de Landro immerse the reader in the wild information noise of modern society with endless news, messages, sensations and advertising, a cult of beauty and success - and already at the next turn they poke their nose into the dirty realities of a women's prison with maskist wardens and wardens shower without embellishment.
Although the most obvious association with “Bitch Planet” is the “Orange is the hit of the season” series, in fact, much more “Planet” inherited from the operational films of the seventies. The creators themselves use the term "feminist exploitation", but I'm afraid that for now this is completely untranslatable into a Russian term. Well, or at least he will not give birth to the image of the beautiful brutal prisoner Kanau Kogo and her team.