In this review of Poison Ivy #33, Poison Ivy and Peter Undine work on an environmental utopia while the tensions with Janet from HR come to ahead.
Poison Ivy #33 main cover by Jessica Fong (DC Comics)
Poison Ivy #33
Writer: G. Willow Wilson
Artist: Marcio Takara
Cover: Jessica Fong
Variant Covers: Joshua “Sway” Swaby, Kyuyong Eom, Cathy Kwan
Page Count: 32 pages
Release Date: May 6, 2025
This comic book review contains spoilers
The Story
Poison Ivy #33 opens with Ivy pontificating about the nature of dreams. She wonders if we enter an alternate reality when we dream, and if that reality is really the real one. Janet from HR is still recovering from last month but Ivy takes her to see a riverbend village her and Peter Undine have been working on. Janet gets weak and passes out. Undine says living in Marshview has infected her and she may only have a few months to live. Janet overhears this and then meets with the forest spirit Bog Venus to see if she can help. Venus agrees but only if Janet tells her how to separate Ivy from the spirit Xylon and prevent a war. Venus says she will not harm Ivy so Janet tells her she just needs to remove the spell hiding Marshview from the world.
Meanwhile, Peter Undine demonstrates how the new village he constructed will move and change based on the necessities of the natural environment. Ivy asks if she can do anything to repay Undine and he reveals that he is touch starved since he can no longer touch normal humans without killing them due to his toxic skin. Ivy pities him and agrees to cuddle with him in the sunlight. Suddenly, the spell hiding the marshland evaporates and a police helicopter starts firing at them. She grabs Undine and Janet and pulls them to safety before confronting the attackers. Janet laments that Venus wasn’t supposed to hurt Ivy while Ivy tells Peter Undine to bring her The Order of the Green Knight.
Analysis
Poison Ivy #33 sees some interesting developments as the many disparate storylines start to coalesce. G. Willow Wilson has been teasing us with dream theory since at least issue 16 when unsuspecting Seattleite “Chuck” was infected with labia spores which gave him psychedelic interpersonal dreams with Ivy. Here it comes off more as simple metaphor, but it’s recurred frequently enough that hopefully Wilson eventually gives us some kind of mind-bending dream related payoff.
Janet pulls a Fredo in Godfather II right down to speaking the line “no one was supposed to get hurt.” Her general motivations still seem muddy to me. She resents Ivy for treating her as inferior and withholding information but she never considers leaving? She loves Ivy but she also betrays her to save herself? Everyone seems concerned about keeping Janet alive and Bog Venus appears to be the only one capable of doing that, but Janet keeps this secret to create a kind of artificial rift between her and Ivy which can be dragged out ad infinitum.
There’s something tragically lonesome about Ivy and Undine’s platonic cuddle-sesh. It’s intimate in a somewhat transactional way, but Takara depicts Ivy’s facial emotions in such a way that she appears unbothered and even maternal. While she doesn’t show any explicit sexual interest in Undine, she also doesn’t appear annoyed or vacant from the experience. It’s like she really cares for Undine and wants to offer him physical tenderness completely divorced from carnal attraction. It’s a really complex but subtle emotion the team is able to get across. The imbalance of romantic interest between them is transcended for a few pages by a mutual satisfaction for what they’ve accomplished and a matured acceptance of each individual’s misfortune. It’s spelled out in the writing but even if you couldn’t read, you could still follow these emotions fully from Marcio Takara’s art. I’m convinced ninety-nine out of one-hundred other artists couldn’t pull that off.
Final Thoughts
Poison Ivy #33 is a return to form for the run, giving us a satisfying payoff of seeds planted in prior issues as well as an emotional exploration of Peter Undine.
