In this review of Poison Ivy #32, Poison Ivy and Peter Undine take down the monstrous Ed Cooper before Ivy has a meeting with the tree-being Bog Venus.
Poison Ivy #32 main cover by Jessica Fong (DC Comics)
Poison Ivy #32
Writer: G. Willow Wilson
Artist: Brian Level
Main Cover: Jessica Fong
Variant Cover: Joshua “Sway” Swaby, Kyuyong Eom, Bernard Chang, and Robin Higginbottom
Page Count: 22 pages
Release Date: April 3, 2025
This comic book review contains spoilers
Picking up from last month’s Poison Ivy #31, Poison Ivy #32 sees Ivy and Undine attempt to take down the mutated Ed Cooper: AKA the monster of Marshview Swamp. Cooper attacks Janet from HR before Ivy finally restrains him then goes into the woods to seek help. Ivy comes across Bog Venus who agrees to help but asks Ivy if she’s sure she can trust Janet. She says she does although a seed of doubt has been planted. Venus revives Janet and sucks the remaining life out of Ed Cooper. Ivy then walks directly into Bog Venus’ body to have a conversation directed through the green on a metaphysical plane. She tells Venus that Xylon wants to negotiate peace between the green and the grey. Venus has no interest in peace until the grey takes responsibility for the destruction it has already inflicted on the green. After making her point, Venus disappears into mist.
Analysis
Poison Ivy is back with Poison Ivy #32, an issue that continues to kick its plotlines further down the road. We get more teasing of a telegraphed blowup between Poison Ivy and Janet from HR who have secretly aligned themselves with opposing sides of nature (the green and the grey). That conflict is still lingering in the background, and the odd Ed Cooper-Peter Undine interlude was wrapped up with little impact on the ongoing narrative. I’ve officially reached the point where I find G. Willow Wilson’s formula of featuring a couple set pieces supplemented with endless pontification from Ivy about her personality and the nature of life to pad out the story, to be a bit tiring. It was fun at first but it’s increasingly starting to read like she’s trying to increase the word-count on her high school paper.
The narration vacillates between entry-level philosophical concepts and semi-ironic reflections on Ivy’s experiences which come off as a blend between Wilson’s own ideas and jabs at the elevated absurdity of the DC universe. It started out alright, back in the series’ early issues where Ivy was depicted as much more of an anti-villain (remember this whole series started with her ready to wipe out humanity). But now that she’s essentially a hero, her endless monologuing has lost its hip 90s-crime-heroine edge and become more like a self-help guru who thinks they’re cleverer than they are.
Nothing that I’m saying makes this outright terrible or even bad, it’s just more of the same. And after 32 issues, I wouldn’t mind a real shakeup.
After last month’s adjustment period, I have really grown on Brian Level’s art here. Any artist being put up against Marcio Takara is deeply unfair, but Level’s work—specifically in the issue’s back half—is nothing to scoff at. Bog Venus is given some statuesque poses with her vine-y dreads flowing in the breeze, and the angles Level uses during their conversation emphasize Ivy’s growing desperation. I loved some of his wackier page-layouts like on page 2 with the tree branch-like dividers and page 16 where Ed Cooper’s corpse is seemingly being pushed down onto the page itself. Ivy also looks pretty angular and stylized in a way that I found interesting. It takes some getting used to, but once you do it totally works!
I gotta give my obligatory (but necessary) shoutout to Arif Prianto and Hassan Otsamne-Elhaou who do great work on the colors and lettering. The latter is one of this book’s standouts as different entities such as Peter Undine and Bog Venus are given specific speech bubble looks. Bog Venus’ speech even changes depending on if Ivy is speaking with her on the physical or metaphysical plane.
And is it just me or does this version of Peter Undine look especially… O’Keeffe-ian? ‘Nuff said.
Final Thoughts
G. Willow Wilson is stretching some of these plotlines out so thin, they can barely support the weight. But the action is slick and the art is fun, in other words: it’s another issue of Poison Ivy.
