Valentine De Landro

We at ComicsAlliance love comics, and we love music, so this week we’ve decided to combine those two loves and create playlist tributes to some of our favorite titles. Think of these as something to listen to while you read the comic, or an introduction to the vibe of a comic if you're not yet a fan. Kelly Sue DeConnick, Valentine De Landro and Cris Peter's Bitch Planet is one of the most important comics being published today. In addition to being an amazing sci-fi story with glorious butt-kicking women, it’s rife with feminist critique of patriarchy, while still maintaining an inspirational tone. Putting together this playlist, I thought I’d be choosing angry, riot grrrl songs, but what I ended up with feels more like a modern celebration of women. I think Bitch Planet itself is kind of the same thing.

The end of the year is a time of reflection in many ways, and that often means thinking about and assessing what the very best releases in any particular medium were. As we prepare to cross the threshold into 2017, we've been collecting some of the best covers of the year by publisher for your perusal, and today we're looking at fifty of the best comic book covers released from Image Comics in 2016.

Check out the best sci-fi comics in 2016, including our critics' picks and the comics you voted the runners up and winner in this category!

Comics and fashion have always had an interesting relationship, but comics have never centered fashion as much as Danielle Colman hopes to do in the upcoming anthology Couture, currently seeking funding on Kickstarter. Couture features the work of an impressive array of artists focusing on fashion as a storytelling device.

Bitch Planet tells the story of women who are judged “non-compliant” and sent to an extra-planetary penal colony, the "Bitch Planet” of the title. A rare and welcome example of feminist science fiction in comics, it debuted in December 2014 from writer Kelly Sue DeConnick and artist Valentine De Landro, published by Image Comics.

Pre-orders started yesterday for an awesome new line of Espionage Cosmetics nail wraps inspired by Kelly Sue DeConnick and Valentine De Landro's Bitch Planet and Matt Fraction and Chip Zdarsky's Sex Criminals. Nail wraps, for those who aren't familiar with them, are adhesive nail art that can be applied at home easily. Each style was approved by the creative teams on the books and is tastefully but clearly inspired by the excellent comics they're based on. Plus, not only do they have really cool designs, they're also glow-in-the-dark.

Kelly Sue DeConnick and Valentine De Landro's Bitch Planet has the single best comic book title of the year. It's the kind of title where I stopped in my tracks when the book was announced months ago, and just from hearing those two words, thought "that's perfect" -- and that's before I heard that the premise backing it up was a modern feminist sci-fi take on women-in-prison flicks. From the moment I heard about it, I knew this comic was going to be amazing. Until I actually sat down and read it, though, I had no idea just how amazing it was going to be. That's the thing about the first issue of Bitch Planet. It doesn't hit the ground running; it kicks off by blasting you into space and setting up a story of a world where the penalty for not knowing your place is a life sentence in a violent, neon-pink hell, juggling multiple points of view for a story of just how cruel that world can be. It's thrilling, it's violent, and it's one of the best first issues of the year.