Bitch Planet, Vol. 2 by Kelly Sue DeConnick

The shower scene is always either a fight, or the girls playing in the water, or it’s a sex scene. The first one, what we really wanted to do, we were talking about, there’s this thing you see over and over again in these films, which is the shower scene. You’re aware of them as naked more than nude.

We’ve seen things, the nudity, people talk about the nudity making them uncomfortable, and I think it’s because they’re not arranged provocatively for your enjoyment. And when I saw her, I realized I’d never seen her in that context before, and it kind of dropped my jaw a little bit. That is a body type that does not exist in the world of comics. And she is a woman I see every day of my life out in the world, and she has her own kind of beauty. In one of those title spreads, there’s a woman to the right who is a very pear-shaped woman, she has sort of pendulous breasts and her hips and thighs are disproportionately larger than the top of her body. There’s a point in what we call the title spread, that big, ridiculous two-page spread that has the “Bitch Planet” logo in the middle of it. We wanted the nudity to be - and has worked so hard on this, he’s really tried to unlearn everything he’d been taught about how to draw women’s bodies, he’s tried to remove the filter and draw women as they are, and I think he’s done a really incredible job of it.

It was sort of like, “Oh, let us save you from this horrible fate that we are enjoying.” But ghost is trying to save her from this horrible life, but in the scene where Ghost is talking to her about how terrible this is, she’s positioned, they’re both a-to-camera. So “Oh man! Too bad! Now I’m in this corset with my boobs spilling out at the top and this weird nun habit, and my thigh holsters.”…But her sister was, I think, like an adult actress or adult performer or something. But there was one page in particular where the character of Ghost is wearing, inexplicably, for no reason that makes any sense whatsoever, apparently when she got turned into a ghost, she was at a rave or something, and she was wearing a naughty nun. And there were some really fun things with the characters. So when I was working on the book “ Ghost,” I went back and read for the first time a ton of old “Ghost” stuff. They only put it here so they can wag their fingers at it. The practice that most annoys me, and it’s something that exploitation films do, and I also think it’s something that comics frequently do, is they will set up something to be deliberately salacious, and then pretend to have some ethical structure around it.

Bitch Planet, Vol. 2 by Kelly Sue DeConnick