Rating: WARTY!
Kelly Sue Deconnick was batting a .500 with me. Now she's down to .333! This one sounded like a fun romp from the blurb, but isn't that the blurb's job - drag you in no matter what it takes? The fact is that I didn't like this. Others may disagree, but to me it didn't seem very supportive of - or complimentary to - women. It also seemed disorganized and wasteful of paper. I read the e-version, so no trees suffered, but this was clearly designed for a print version, which was itself problematical. The problem with e-versions of comic books is that the regular tablet screen is smaller than the printed comic, so the images and the text are all compressed somewhat, making for a read of sometimes questionable quality.
Two-page spreads simply do not work on a pad, because (at least in Bluefire reader on my iPad) it will show only one page at a time, and even if you rotate the pad to landscape view, it merely makes the page smaller - it doesn't show you the other page in the spread. There are probably settings to make it show two pages at a time, but then you're screwed because it's too small to read. Yes, you can enlarge the image, but then you're screwed because you're constantly having to slide the image around to see all of it. In short, it doesn't work in the e-version and comic book creators don't seem to be able to get this into their heads.
There was one other issue, too, in the e-version. Pages 118 and 119 were completely devoid of text. This isn't down to this comic alone. I've seen this before in other comics I've read in e-version. The speech balloons were there, but no one was home! I don't know what causes this, and it was just these two pages, but the images alone failed to convey what was being said there, not even vaguely, so this was a serious fail form more than one perspective.
So much for technical problems. What about the graphic novel itself? Graphic novels are all about imagery, but for me unless they're also about story, they don't work. I mean if I want simply to look at pretty pictures I can go to an art show or buy a coffee-table book. I need a story to come with the images. The images alone, especially in this case where they were less than wonderful as they were here, don't do it unless the comic is designed for them to do it, such as the Love comic series, for example, which has so far been excellent. So art work having failed, the entire thing came down to the story, and this story made little sense.
First of all, it's a rip-off of Margaret Atwood's The Hand-Maid's by way of the movie Rollerball, and the intention is to presumably and eventually show these oppressed women as victors, yet here they are starting out from a position of defeat when they had previously - i.e. in our own time - been gaining successes after previously being in a position of oppression for centuries. How are we supposed to imagine them being victorious when clearly the premise here is that they've obviously been thoroughly defeated and humiliated, and when nothing has changed since that defeat, whenever and however it came about?
Worse than this, nothing was offered to explain how this sorry state came to be from what we have now. How did women become even more objectified, even more doll-like, even more subjugated than they already are today? What this story says to me is that women were somehow weak or inadequate, or passive that they descended from the hard-won position they're in today - not ideal, I admit, but a lot better than they had a hundred - even a thousand - years ago. How did this happen? What went wrong? This is an important question and it's unanswered - at least in this volume.
I found the central idea of this novel to be contradictory. The idea that "bad women" - in this novel, those who fail to conform to a male-centric view of how a woman should be - are actually then rewarded by this absurdly punitive and oppressive society, in that they're treated to an interstellar trip to what, for all intents and purposes, appears to be more akin to holiday camp in another solar system than ever it does to a penal system - or even a penile system! On this "prison" planet, they don't have to deal with men at all! That's like punishing homosexuals by locking them up with a bunch of sex-starved and horny male prisoners! We've wised-up about that, but here, we're being told that if the evil men-that-be are intent upon punishing or even reforming these women, they send them on vacation?
Interstellar travel is prohibitively expensive and time-consuming. It's definitely not the the modern equivalent of shipping convicts to Australia and leaving them there. It cannot be justified given the premise we're presented here: that women are second class and devalued. Why would this be the result of infractions in the future, when today men and women are - at least on paper - equal, yet women are routinely treated as second-class, objectified, and raped? Wouldn't the future be worse if this is truly a society in which women are openly and actively treated as second class citizens? Understand that I'm certainly not prescribing such a thing, but the novel seemed like it wasn't very well thought out to me, given this and other plot points.
Note that there's a lot of nudity and bad language in this story. Talking of objectivity, the nudity is all female. This doesn't bother me, but it may bother others. What I found intriguing about all the nudity (aside from comic book artists complete lack of inhibition over portraying nude females contrasted with their fastidious avoidance of male nudity) was that in this future world, all women no longer shave. There's no explanation offered for this. Not that I have any say in it, but personally I prefer a natural look; however, that's not the fashion today in the US, so again we have a circumstance holding for which there is no explanation offered. It's one more unanswered question amidst many.
Perhaps the biggest problem though, is in the way these women are "allowed" (from the plot) to try to escape this slavery. It isn't through smarts. Once again it's through exploitation of their bodies - through sports, and not even via intelligent individualism! Seriously? Yet again it comes down to: "Hey, don't concern yourself with what's in their pretty little heads, just focus on their bodies, because let's face it, that's all they really have to offer, isn't it?" I'm never able to avoid raising eyebrows at the sheer number of female authors who evidently buy into this, at least as judged by how they write.
Maybe things change in future volumes? I can't speak to that, but for this volume, I honestly think a story is insulting to women when they're put into a position of having to act like male stereotypes, or of kow-towing to men to garner a victory. There are a lot of different ways of being a kick-ass female; I just wish female writers would explore more of those instead of confining their lead females to being 'men with tits' as the phrase has it. I can't recommend this, and I have no desire to read any more in this series. I think this needed a far better grounding and a lot stronger plot than it has. The way it is, it simply doesn't work in my opinion.
