To discuss Poison Ivy is to environmentalism. To discuss patriarchy. To discuss collective archetypes, and evolving narratives. To discuss Golden Age femmes fatale and black widows. To discuss thrill killers and team ups. To discuss redemption, and defiance, and friendship. To discuss narrative polemics, women in the sciences, the rush of urbanisation, and the male gaze. In short – and frankly this will be the only part of this review that is short – to discuss Ivy is to discuss multitudes.
This singular character romps around this huge swathe of conceptual ground, making what might seem to be a straight-forward review into a surprisingly monumental undertaking. Feeling overwhelmed by our own complex thoughts, and being fully aware we were a fairly narrow pair of perspectives, we put out a call for help. Many of you have seen, and responded – either on Twitter, through the site or via email – to our Poison I(vy)Q call for comment, where we sought to get opinions from the wider audience about how they see Ivy and her future placement.
This call got more responses than anything else we’ve ever put up online. Why? Because fan considerations about who the character is, and what she represents have become a considerable talking point, one which has doubtless prompted (at least in part) DC’s decision to give the character her own six-issue miniseries, the first issue of which debuts today.
We will be talking about the issue, but to consider the story absent its surrounding context would do it a disservice, as well as mischaracterise the specific imperatives and concerns which drive it: both as an example of a Poison Ivy story and as a “road test” for how the DCU (and DC Comics) as a whole will deal with questions of a changing industry, fanbase and world.
Think we’re overstating it? Think again.
The Challenges of Ivy
It was the era of Batman ’66 (the year, not the comic!) and the heroic and deputised ally of the stalwart Gotham police department and his colourful kid sidekick demonstrated that crime did not pay to a baroque collection of criminals committing themed capers. In Beware of Poison Ivy, Dr Lillian Rose enters this scene with a catchy name, a memorable theme and cool powers. Even in these lighter days, the title already points to the era’s interest in the succubi archetype. Lillian Rose’s narrative is domestic in nature, a child-friendly riff on the vengeful seductress (female villains of the time often seem destined for the Bruce Wayne Reform School for Wayward Villainesses after being redeemed by Batman’s stern tones). Certainly, the vengeance of a woman scorned is already baked in, with Sheldon Moldoff and Robert Kanigher positioning her as a second-string Catwoman, a thief poisoned by an untrustworthy lover.
Post-Crisis, Ivy was reborn. In 1986, at the hands of Neil Gaiman and Mike Dringenberg , Poison Ivy became Pamela Isley, a name too pun-tastic to ever die. She also picked up a new and highly specific modus operandi ripped from the headlines: Poison Ivy was an eco-terrorist. Initially a victim of the villain The Floronic Man (Dr Jason Woodrue), Pamela Isley was given as a woman who preferred plants to people, and who sought contemptuous, if somewhat sympathetic revenge, on the human world (and particularly the man’s world) that had run roughshod over both her and her plants. Six years after the formation of Earth First!, and a few years ahead of ELF, Poison Ivy’s new identity took root (yeah, pun intended) amongst a profound sea-change, where the archetype of the ecological extremist took shape. The story retains her toxic allure and her romantic fixations, painting her as obsessed with Batman even as the men around her become obsessed with her.
At this point, it is worth touching on an important digression, following Gaiman’s career briefly. One of his next projects is Black Orchid, a reconceptualised Golden Age property turned into… a human/plant hybrid exploring themes of ecofeminism, personal identity and shades of grey morality. Gaiman, in an early showing of his knack for myth-shaping, places Ivy in the context of the Floronic Man and Swamp Thing, and the DCU’s conceptualisation of the Green. Though Ivy appears here, briefly, as the jealous villain, effectively as Orchid gone wrong, the real importance of Black Orchid for Ivy is not her appearance as a “dark mirror”, but rather the attempt at creating an ecofeminist hero who stood outside the usual four-color morality and reversion to status quo habits and, perhaps, the failure of that story to catch fire in the way Sandman did, exalting Black Orchid into the comics reading consciousness as that character.
The eco-terrorist version of Ivy was further reinforced in the seminal 1990s Batman: The Animated Series, which entwined Ivy as a foe of the establishment whose at times noble causes were compromised by her fanaticism and blinkered thinking. It was this version of the character that was heightened into saucy camp (filtered back, in many ways, through the lens of Batman ’66) by Uma Thurman’s turn in Batman & Robin. In the film, Isley’s transformation is seen as the key to unlocking a seductive feminine power within a deliberately dowdy scientist – but the change is presented as an opportunity not just for empowerment, but for an overwhelming desire for revenge.
In fact, the common thread to Ivy’s early incarnations has been this mix of victim-hood and projected misandry. We are told by many constructions of the narrative to sympathise with what happened to Ivy, but that this doesn’t excuse the outrages of her behaviour. In effect, that although she is to be pitied for her tragedies, her approach is altogether too angry, too extreme, too unforgiving and too dangerous. Moreover, we are told her personal tragedies undercut any rhetorical arguments she makes, as they are ultimately disingenuous, the political as a disguise for the ultimately personal.
The character’s name and nature (as something desirable but deadly) serve to introduce elements of sex to Batman’s world – and for certain incarnations of the character, this represents a dangerous element entering into a fundamentally pre-adolescent world and worldview. Boys and their toys. Ivy shares this trope, of course, with Catwoman, amongst other such villains, with their all-male goon squads and offers to make Batman their consort.
With Ivy, however, this goes beyond illicit temptation to danger. Her sexuality is filtered, often, through the lens of predatory sexuality: she has been explicitly portrayed on many occasions as a sexualised serial killer (most notably in Paul Dini and Joe Benites’ Harvest story from Detective Comics #823), but has also been treated as an effective lesbian separatist, or a callous prostitute (see, particularly, Dan Slott and Ryan Sook’s Arkham Asylum: Living Hell). All of these incarnations, of course, represent a kind of “nightmare scenario” for a certain kind of male gaze, policing sex work and sexual freedom by equating them with a monstrous lack of conscience. With Ivy, this is sometimes explicated further with granting her the power of sex-based or pheremonal mind-control, formalising the argument that lust forced a man into criminality, negating choice and turning him into a patsy for a Lady Macbeth incapable of unwilling to carry out her own crimes.
Ivy’s femininity and misandry were later elevated to a kind of dark but viable feminism through her association with Harley Quinn. Harley also explores issues of sexuality, exploitation and victimhood, and in historic contrast, Ivy’s “elder sister” role in the double act took on an air of being less emotional and less victimised, which in turn made her position seem more nuanced and appealing, especially within the context of the “bad guys doing bad things entertainingly” yarns that don’t generally stretch in implication beyond the anecdotal.
Terror of the unbound woman fed the argument that, unless controlled, women will in turn control, and further, that their control leads to the death of reason and the exaltation of base feelings. This is a principal thread in counter-feminist storytelling, and it feeds back into the wider discussion of Poison Ivy. Ivy’s womanhood, for example, is tied in to her focus on ecology and environmentalism. Cast as an “unnatural woman”, Ivy’s affinity for nature is often cast as misdirected or creepy maternal urges. Her urgent need to defend the ecosystem is often narrowed down to absurd-seeming cases of cooing over an individual plant. There is no doubt – says the narrative – that the environment is suffering, but to take the matter to extremes turns you from a hero (or at least a victim) into a villain. Ivy’s villainous problems are often treated as matters of scale – yes, it’s upsetting that Plant X suffered, but surely no plant is worth a human life!(!!)
The mouthpiece for this issue is often Batman, who serves both to stop Ivy from executing whatever plan she wants to execute, but also to turn to her erstwhile victims and give them a stern talking-to for whatever brought down Ivy’s wrath.Obsession and overkill, arising out of tragedy and victimhood, is, of course, just another example of one of Batman’s rogues gallery being reshaped to mirror elements of the Dark Knight himself. But Ivy’s presence on the Rogue’s Gallery is a sticking point, because, fundamentally, DC isn’t going to make Batman a bad guy, and Batman’s role, for better or worse, is largely to preserve the status quo from chaotic elements that seek to disrupt it. That makes driving the character to extremes a naturally tempting avenue of storytelling, because it allows creators to justify Batman in fighting her, whilst still raising the spectre of some of the issues she signifies.
Following this logic, there have been strong arguments made that it is impossible for Ivy to remain herself and, within the DCU, be anything other than a villain. “Right action” is a variable concept, of course, to be populated by the preferences and considerations of the creative team, but it is uniformly consonant with what Batman ultimately does. Miller’s Batman may not be Snyder’s Batman may not be Grell’s Batman, but Batman stands for a moral order. Narrative, commercial and cultural pressures then hem in the shape of Batman’s moral order. Narratively, Batman defines certain things. While the character contains multitudes, he remains a wealthy, white, urban male written mostly by white, urban males, defending the Enlightenment order they created.
Commercially, the DCU is roughly congruent with our world. Aliens, demons, mad science and underwater empires may abound, but they serve – especially in Batman stories – as decoration over a world we easily empathise with. This is a key element in superhero comics, where the status quo of the world is often similar to our own, but with trappings, out of a desire to provide emotional authenticity over internal logic. Unfortunately, sustaining that instant recognisability as a thinly abstracted version of our own world has a corollary – if our hero is to be successful in his endeavours, his endeavours must either be distant in space (bringing justice the “orange skins and the purple skins”, but not the black man of middle America), in time (“I, Tony Stark, will solve the world energy crisis… in forty-two years”) or dedicated to the status quo (“The Joker is no longer Mayor, thanks to you, Batman!”)
Batman defends the people the “assumed” reader associates with, and the order which provides for their lifestyles. The reader is primed to react against radical ideological threats to that order. The complexity of Ivy’s story has fallen, all too often, into this tension between recognising the validity of the alternative perspective and the narrative need to enforce Batman’s premises.
This is not a problem for Ivy alone, with countless causes caught up in this tide. Frank Castle is drawn, as we’ve mentioned many times before, from the law and order fears of the urban jungle, of outlaws beyond the control of the social order inflicting untold damage on a population that has rendered itself helpless through corruption and lack of will. The Punisher’s approach – to serve as a soldier in a “War on Crime” made very literal – stands in utter contrast with the Marvel Universe’s thesis, where moral if not legal rules make murder, even of the worst of us, a moral event horizon which, if crossed, only makes the world a worse place.
Within his own comic, Frank’s war has been read differently by different writers – as immoral, as heroic or as understandable but misguided – but they all serve as presenting Frank in a complex light, distant from but not detached from the super-heroic world he was spawned out of. A fragile social contract has survived the decades of Punisher stories, and its basic clauses read like this. The Punisher’s war is never-ending, and his accomplishments are left ambiguous, for the reader to ultimately evaluate. Where Frank interacts with superheroes, he serves as a critique of the dominant narrative. He never proves the superheroic narrative wrong, nor is he himself dissuaded from his purpose.
Marvel’s Punisher stands as an example of an ethos rejected by the Marvel Universe and yet continuing on as a standing critique, but DC has always had more trouble with this sort of balancing act. Deathstroke, the Terminator, once walked this middle line, a super-human mercenary that fought for the United States and his own honour but rejected any higher aspirational vision of his country or his existence. Increasingly, however, this character has turned into a maddened villain. Even as the Identity Crisis era sought to blur the line between hero and villain, it also sought to reinforce that the poles by which these ideals were defined (and from which titular heroes had strayed), contained an assumed dominant discourse about how “the way things were meant to be”, which positioned their “classic” icons (welcome back, Barry Allen) as the emblems of a brighter, better world. This increasing tendency to look back on the past as a halcyon period has the necessary effect of grandfathering in elements of the past that are best forgotten: tacit sexism and racism, inward looking politics and interpersonal relationships that cater to a previous generation’s notion of sexuality, commerce and professionalism. Overall, it has been hard for any DC character to exist continuously outside the established order. And yet, this may be something on the precipice of change.
Why Poison Ivy? Why Now?
Because, of course, all that is changing.
Two major shifts in personal politics (and thus the discourse that surrounds comics), have coincided to put the issue of Ivy front and centre:
Firstly, and most simply, our attitude to the environment has evolved since 1966, since 1986, since 1992 and 1997. Even as those years articulated their own environmental concerns, environmental care has now become one of the definitive challenges and puzzles for the human race. Man-made disruption of the environment, in the form of climate change, is one of the leading puzzles for government, corporations and private citizens, and the possibility of an insufficient response could be catastrophic. Economic hardship directly caused by large corporations have made more people than ever skeptical of the supposed financial benefits that this environmental hazarding can bring, and even those willing to roll the dice for a little more money are by and large forced to concede (if they want to remain a rational part of public discourse) that something must be done. Measures that sounded extreme twenty years ago look much more rational now in the cold light of day. Ivy’s crusade looks less like fringe activity, and much more like a passionate – if ruthless – attempt to save the world. Previous instances of doomsaying are grandfathered in to Cassandra-like prophecy: she was telling everyone for years, and nobody listened.
Secondly, and more critically, comics’ traditionally suspect treatment of women has been forced to change by demographic shifts, both in authorship and readership, as well as cultural changes in the expectations of readers in their existing demographics. It is fundamentally unacceptable (as it should be) to a modern audience that all women be whores or Madonnas, that they be dangerous criminals or supporting players, that – and this perhaps is the most significant – that their views should be skewed to support the dominant paradigm of a man who should be telling them what to do.
People will, of course, say Ivy’s a serial killer and a maniac – after all, we’ve seen that in the stories. Indeed, a common dissenting response in our explorations was that there is certainly a valid appetite for feminist or environmentalist heroes, but why not bring reboot Black Orchid, or create someone new? Already, Harley and Catwoman have abandoned their black hats for an independent life as quasi-heroes in their own right, and Batman’s Rogue’s gallery is consequentially increasingly male dominated. Is it a separate form of sexism, it is argued, to reduce even further the presentation of self-willed “evil” women, to paint their crimes as past errors rather than the malevolent prime movers in their own descent? Why, in short, remove a perfectly compelling villain with a long history of discomforting monstrosity when other options abound?
The answer, as usual, is because these are comics. Comics aren’t documentary records. When a character is written a certain way, a statement is being made. Because of past attitudes about feminism, sexuality and environmentalism, Ivy has been shaped into a caricature of pin-up forbidden fruit, a misandrist nightmare scenario and a fringe terrorist. By making that reactionary choice for an extended period, the comics of the past chose to speak to, and undermine, very real issues of feminism, ecology and eco-feminism. It’s no wonder that for some members of the audience, Poison Ivy’s quest is seen as more quixotic than diabolical – and that in so far as she is portrayed as a villain, she is being made that way.
This process – a process that is already well underway – is known as reclamation – taking a pejorative portrayal and spinning it into a positive aspect of your identity. Writers with sympathies towards Ivy’s complex knot of ideas have pushed this process and have sought to paint a more sympathetic view of both Ivy and her crusade over the years. In response, feeling their transgressive reading being heard, Poison Ivy has grown a significant fan presence, becoming ever more associated with her causes. Perhaps there were other candidates, but they have not gelled. Nothing succeeds like success.
In preparation for this piece we took some informal polling about why that is the case, particularly given the history of past portrayals. “Unapologetic” was a word that often arose. A character who demands to be listened to and taken seriously, without sacrificing her sexuality or femininity in order to do so. “Tough“. “Indomitable“. “Intelligent.” “Socially conscious“. What seems to differentiate Pamela Isley from a generic, if untainted, eco-feminist is that she is associated with extreme measures. For those who feel their urgent calls have been outside the Overton window for far too long, there is much to be said for a character that in some sense has been “with them” all through. For groups painted historically as extremists, a hero falsely painted the same way may be exactly what they respond to. It is certainly worth nothing that her iconic look has also made her popular among the increasingly vital cosplay community, where she is a regular standout in conventions and photosets.
The New 52 offered DC a prime opportunity to jettison the continuity of those old stories, and allow Ivy’s baseline character to be reassessed in a modern cultural context. It’s very notable that of the most public and significant female Bat-villains (Catwoman, Harley Quinn and now Poison Ivy) all of them have been moved from villainy into their own role as protagonists – and protagonists who are expected to garner a significant degree of audience sympathy. These characters are recognisable – iconic – but the world is forced to reappraise cultural artifacts of a bygone era in light of the rejection of that era’s often gendered and politicised assumptions.
New 52
Ivy’s New 52 incarnation has been mixed. She was immediately included in the hero team the Birds of Prey in its initial revival…but was suspected by her team-mates of a double cross (which eventually came to pass). Since then, she has unfurled various machinations against and with the Gotham underworld, palled around (or something more!) with perennial companion Harley Quinn. She is also given a new origin story with a background of family abuse, and an accident with her own chemical research that cost her her job and her credibility. Fans of the character have certainly been happy to see her abstracted from the frothing villain of yore, but demand has been high for the character to be given an opportunity in her own story to be given a richer characterisation and a more consistent modern ethos.
What have people been asking for?
- “more focus on the scientist side of Poison Ivy, where she experiments with new uses of her abilities”
- “A heroic Poison Ivy…without throwing out everything else we understand of the character”
- “To see her building interactions and friendships with her own set of characters, new and old”
- “An environmental hero…”
- “To be a bit of a wildcard, a character where you never know what to expect…”
- “To remember how powerful she is…”
- “To have an ethical dilemma”…
- “To grow more as herself, not just as Batman’s enemy or Harley’s friend/partner…”
So, after all this preamble, how did the issue itself stack up? (Spoilers below)
A Cycle of Life and Death
To an extent, managing the burden of sociopolitical expectations is all but impossible, the task of pleasing everyone Herculean. Vested interests will lean in favour of protecting the established Bat-franchise and its morality, DC will want something with a broad enough appeal to do maximum numbers, hardcore Bat-fans will expect their heroes to feature significantly in what could be viewed as a “spin-off” title, Harley Quinn fans will have an interest in seeing a state of affairs on their relationship, doubters of that relationship would prefer the pair separated, whilst Ivy fans – the group that most clamoured for this series, to the point where you can fairly say they brought it into existence – are hoping for the series to deliver on the promise they think the character has too long been denied.
Amy Chu rather smartly focuses on the narrow rather than the broad, not seeking to serve all interests in a single issue of a comic book, instead trying to ground her vision of Ivy’s life and personality in clear steps.
The issue presents an Ivy who has a fundamental difficulty in relating to humans. Not as a misanthrope, but as an ultimate outcast, for whom forms of interaction and communication – even with the people she is close to – serve to be a frightening and aggravating puzzle. It is plants she understands.
Re-ensconced in the bosom of academic botany, an old friend of Ivy’s has scored her a job at the Gotham Botanical Gardens; surprisingly no-one Bat-branded, but instead an old academic colleague and mentor who hasn’t given up on her quite yet.
The issue frames certain key forms of toxic masculinity – rape-culture influenced bikers, prejudiced masculonormative academics, sleazy co-workers and aggressive bandits – less as powerful antagonists and more as a continual and unavoidable annoyance to Ivy. This is a smart call from a representational angle – it allows Ivy to showcase her power and control in situations, without losing sight of the continued harassment and disadvantage women in the real world face day-to-day, in a way that is subtler than having her fight ‘The Patriarch’ or ‘Mister MRA’.
By keeping these issues as background points to be navigated, the issue frees up some character work to focus on Ivy’s key female relationships: with Harley Quinn who makes an extended appearance, and with her mentor Dr Luisa Cruz.
These characters are not served as well as Ivy herself is. While Chu’s grasp of her vision of Ivy seems strong, the attempt to balance Ivy’s severe attachment disorders (and subsequent moodswings and jealousy) with Harley’s skill as a therapist loses a little in the confines of a 22-page comic. Though Harley’s reaction doesn’t seem wholly out of character, it does seem to be a missed opportunity to give Ivy some insight into herself from somewhere other than her own thoughts.
Cruz, we don’t come to know much at all – her personality is largely undefined besides her faith in Ivy. This, of course, is a necessary evil, given the end of the story and the tone of the mystery it seeks to develop. Some of the best mysteries work because the detective has loyalty to the victim, even as the course of the investigation reveals they don’t know them quite as well as they thought they did.
Interspersed with this intrigue is the promise of the fruits of real (super)scientific research – a fountain of youth – a non-destructive manifestation of the power of the environment that nevertheless people would be willing to kill and die for. It’s a clever way to put Ivy’s botanist background front and centre without resorting to a super-weapon or an army of unstoppable plant soldiers.
These are all good steps to manage the portrayal of the character, but if there’s a weakness in the issue it’s that it almost feels like too much of a fresh start. We know that Ivy “has a past”, and we’re able to glean the impression from Harley that it has at least elements of danger, but there is little sense of the extremes to which Ivy has previously been driven as being something that she’s consciously turned her back on. Rather, it feels like they were never really there.
To see someone publicly known for trying to poison much of the city – in this continuity alone – easily thrown in with a school group or in a public institution feels a little jarring. There is no indication she has been on parole, and she certainly isn’t in disguise. While this all could be explained easily enough (because comics), it’s not just an issue of Ivy’s re-entry into society being seemingly hassle-free. Her decision to return to her academic roots in favour of… whatever it was she did with Harley, and on her own in previous titles, and to whatever end she did it… is justified simply by her saying that she likes the work and the return to research.
This is the Gordian knot Chu will need to cut to turn the comic from an enjoyable, if light, 22 pages, into something more significantly substantive. If Ivy’s previous actions were justified by an urgent need to protect the planet and the people, how can she slip so easily back into the systems that she considered were failing them before? If Ivy needed to save the world her way, on her terms, what does buckling back down to a 9-to-5 say about that ambition? Is she regretful of its cost? Has she given up? Does she trust someone else to do it? There are weighty issues to be explored, but so far the story hasn’t taken the time to bring them front and centre, let alone drill down on them.
The art by Clay and Seth Mann is sleek and photorealistic – often sexy without being too exploitative – even an extended naked Ivy sequence feels more like a presentation of her sexuality on her terms rather than wholly to titillate the audience, and to abrogate the sexuality of the character feels like it would be a mistake. It can at times feel a little stilted, but it’s still eye-catching and clear.
The time has never been riper for a character who embodies many of the great social challenges of our age to take a central place in superhero stories – which are, after all, just convenient metaphors to examine our own ideascape. Fans of the character are likely to welcome this comic, but it may not yet be a sufficiently rich character piece to attract people from the alternatives available in the superhero market. Moreover, with the first issue, it is too early to say what direction Ivy is being pushed in – is she a criminal turned ethical scientist? An antihero, enjoyable but not admirable? A three-dimensional villain, perhaps? Or can she become a new sort of hero, standing for her own principles and unapologetically employing her own methods, yet allowed to coexist with the classic costumed crusaders? And whichever way it goes, will it be sufficient to carry the audience with it and create a new permanent brand for Ivy in this era? There are good fundamentals in this comic, grounded in a clear view of a complex character, and great room to grow in future issues. There’s fertile soil in this character and her history, but what it yields up still hasn’t been seen.
