In Poison Ivy #19, the story takes a welcome detour from its ongoing narrative for the first of a three-part origin story.
Title: Poison Ivy #19
Writer: G. Willow Wilson
Artist: Marcio Takara
Colors: Arif Prianto
Letters: Hassan Otsamne-Elhaou
Cover: Jessica Fong
Variant Covers: Yanick Paquette, Dave McCaig, David Nakayama
Release Date: February 6, 2024
This comic book review contains spoilers
Back to the Beginning
G. Willow Wilson’s Poison Ivy has made a name for itself as one of the most consistent and well-performing books on comic shelves today. But even ardent supporters like myself have noticed an increasing lack of direction as the series stretches well beyond its originally intended length. What started as a road-story with an intriguing apocalyptic ticking-clock element has spiraled with pregnancy and love-triangle subplots galore. While Wilson takes the next several months to sort out the main storyline, we’re treated to the first of a three-part prequel taking us back to Pamela Isley’s college days and her early relationship with Dr. Jason Woodrue.
Directly following the events of the previous issue when Ivy gave birth to a Jason Woodrue plant monster thing(?), we see Ivy’s field of vision fade to labia-framed black as we jump back at least a decade. A teenage Pamela Isley tells her mother she needs to maintain her 4.0 GPA to get into the Seattle Bio-Chem program she wants, but her mom is more worried about the manipulative men she might encounter in the program. Little bumps of acne replace Isley’s leafy face tattoos, and a Wonder Woman poster is hung earnestly from her bedroom wall. The following page features another time jump immediately signaled by Isley’s cleared-up skin. She has successfully made it into the program, along with some of the best botanists in the world, but strangely feels a stronger connection with her professor than her peers.
The feeling is mutual, as Dr. Woodrue invites her to his office after hours to discuss a new project that involves hybridizing plant and animal DNA. After Isley and another female colleague are promoted, Woodrue’s temperamental personality starts to manifest as he blows up at the two for missing a deadline. This doesn’t snuff Isley’s interest in him, in fact their office meetings soon evolve into love-making sessions which only serve to strengthen Woodrue’s hold over her. Their affair alienates the other students who seem to drop out of the story as Isley forgets about them. After the university cuts off funding for Woodrue’s bizarre breeding experiments, Isley, now completely under his spell, steals the necessary materials from the school’s biology lab. Thus the pimply straight-A silent student we met in the issue’s opening moments is gone, and the villain Poison Ivy is born.
Does This Seem Familiar?
I love G. Willow Wilson’s writing. She’s not afraid to address hot social issues head-on and never at the expense of entertainment (although sometimes at the expense of subtlety). After tackling issues such as global warming, fracking, the pandemic, unplanned pregnancy, etc., Wilson moves her sights to the abuse of power structures and what in recent years has become described as the “Weinstein effect.” Jason Woodrue is presented as a Keith Raniere-type figure both in appearance and behavior. For those unaware, Raniere ran a self-help organization that fronted a massive web of sexual abuse for which he was later found guilty.
In Wilson’s story, Woodrue abuses his position of power by coercing Isley into a sexual relationship with him and then weaponizing Isley’s affection to push her towards crime. Of course, he carefully refrains from giving her explicit instructions to give the illusion of agency: “You have to think outside the box, Pamela. Outside the rule book. If you’re serious about your future in this field, you’ll do whatever it takes… I’m sure you’ll think of something. You’re so clever… You have to help me, Pam. You’re the only one who can” etc.
While I fully support the messaging Wilson is trying to convey, I think some readers will be disappointed by this change in Ivy’s history. Certainly, the element of Woodrue using social power structures over her is different, however there are undeniable parallels to Paul Dini’s Mad Love, the Eisner-winning Harley Quinn origin story. Both Harley and Ivy are portrayed as highly intelligent, morally right people who are manipulated wholesale by an evil charismatic man and abandon their old life for an obsessive love affair. In neither case does this man return their love but simply uses it to exhibit full power over them. Don’t get me wrong, I love Mad Love, but wouldn’t it be great to get a female villain origin story that passes the Bechdel test? Someone who doesn’t become evil because a man forced them to? There are so few female villains, and for Ivy’s new origin to pull so liberally from another female villain’s origin, especially one that sits quite differently in the social landscape of today than it did in 1994, is disappointing. Even as Dini was pulling inspiration from the Charles Manson-dynamic, whereas Wilson sources the more recent Weinstein/Raniere ones, the story remains very similar at its core.
Furthermore, this story doesn’t serve Ivy’s more dominant personality nearly as well as Quinn’s. She is dumbed down to fill the Harleen Quinzel role of victim, and it does a disservice to her character. I can only hope that Wilson has something interesting up her sleeve for parts two and three that will recontextualize this relationship in a more unique way.
It’s not only Ivy’s character that suffers from the story’s social agendizing framework. Jason Woodrue is about as one-dimensional as you can get. He’s a handsome science genius, and we’re meant to believe he has a charismatic magnetism that Isley can’t resist, but there’s almost none of that on the page. We see him explode with anger in the lab, and then he just gives off this menacing-mysterious quality in every scene while obsessing over creating plant/animal mutations. Ivy constantly refers to him in the narration as “intoxicating” or as an “evil genius,” but we’re not shown any of this, we’re only told it. With certain phrases like “Great Man” hammered in bold text, it indicates that maybe Wilson is more interested in exploring these power dynamics in the abstract than creating them organically from these well-established characters. We must wait for the next two issues to provide clarity on this.
Poison Ivy #19 variant cover by Yanick Paquette
The Art
In my mind, the issues of Poison Ivy thus far can be sorted distinctly into two categories: those drawn by Marcio Takara, and those not drawn by Marcio Takara. That’s not to say the series hasn’t had some wonderful guest artists, but Takara’s work is something special and this issue is no exception. G. Willow Wilson has used the historical absence of Poison Ivy solo stories (save a few one-shots and a six-issue mini) to explore a whole gambit of genres, now slipping into the classic: coming-of-age. As a result, much of this issue takes place in classrooms, offices, and labs, but everything is so brilliantly realized you probably won’t even notice.
Takara’s environments will feel immediately familiar to anyone who has ever taken a college science course, with the stationary block tables and flat troffer lighting. But it’s the character detail that is the true MVP of the issue. The facial performance that Ivy is imbued with through the art is remarkable. The entire emotional through-line of the story relies on us following her thought process, and while I do have issues with that as stated above, Takara’s art goes a long way in bridging the gap.
Just as much credit should go to Arif Prianto, whose color choice and deliberate contrast make this book one you could literally pour over for hours. Pitch black shadows slowly start to surround Isley as she feels more and more isolated, particularly in Woodrue’s office and the empty lab near the end. There are several moments where characters are drawn entirely in shadow, and their figure is blacked out except for a few streaks of hair or a tiny bit of skin on the bridge of the nose or forehead. This technique is used a few times when Ivy is listening to her mother and Woodrue, as well as when she first enters the storage room lab, but it finally pays off in a stunning panel when Ivy and Woodrue kiss at the end. Visually, that’s my single favorite moment in the issue. I could frame it (and I might).
Killer Quotes
Lastly, there are some incredible turns of phrase in Ivy’s narration that I would like to highlight:
- “Regret is what happens when we learn lessons too late to apply them.”
- “Evil people make you believe that in order to accept their truths, you have to accept their methods.”
- “But some poisons are so intoxicating you don’t even notice they’re KILLING you. They become part of who you are.”
Wilson’s poetic writing in the narration is one of the other highlights of this issue.
Editor’s Note: DC Comics provided TBU with an advanced copy of this comic for review purposes. You can find this comic and help support TBU in the process by purchasing this issue digitally on Amazon or a physical copy of the title through Things From Another World.
