Poison Ivy #13 // Review
What they’re building will be the tallest residential building in Gotham City. It might not be owned by Lex Luthor, but he IS buying up a hell of a lot of real estate in Gotham. There’s a young woman who shows up at the site. She’s got long, red hair and beautiful facial markings. She’s wearing green coveralls. Says she’s working in landscaping. She’s not. She’s there to do something else entirely in Poison Ivy #13. Writer G. Willow Wilson continues one of the single most consistently satisfying mainstream comics. Artists Marcio Takara, Guillem March, Kelley Jones, and A.L. Kaplan continue the story of Ivy’s return to Gotham in style.
Ivy is looking to bring down a hell of a construction project. Why? Well...Killer Croc wants her to take the place down so that he’ll have more room to move around in the sewers of the city. If he’s moving around in the sewers of the city, he’s going to be that much less interested in the swamp just outside Gotham City. Ivy wants to establish a hideout for herself to lay low with Harley when things get hot. She’s been in town for 0nly a short time, and she’s already gotten a threat from Batman. She needs that swamp. So it looks like Gotham City’s going to have to lose one rather prominent condominium high-rise construction project...
Wilson is also playing right to the heart of one of Ivy’s most charming traits: her political/intellectual life. All too often, the main character in a mainstream superhero comic has to be just...vaguely nice politically without any specific affiliation. Ivy is an extremist with some very practically radical eco-conscious perspectives on things. It’s fun to hang out with her over the course of 20-plus pages and get to know her intellectually a bit more every issue. The intellectual life of a mainstream superhero is so often overlooked. It’s cool that Wilson is working with that around the edges of the central plot.
It’s a rather large group of artists working on the issue. Takara opens and closes the issue. Takara’s style is a very distinct look for the series, so it makes sense that his art would anchor the issue. Guillem March follows that up with a graceful meeting between Ivy and Catwoman, which feels right, as March has worked pretty extensively with Catwoman in the past. Kelley Jones’s dreamy iconic work on Sandman with Neil Gaiman still resonates in his work all these decades later. Here, he’s illustrating an encounter between Batman and Ivy in which she instinctively resorts to her more traditional supervillain costuming. A.L. Kaplan illustrates a surprisingly nuanced dramatic conversation between Ivy and Killer Croc.
Poison Ivy started out as a rather weak villain that was occasionally interesting in the past, but Wilson is taking the character in a direction that solidly establishes her as one of the most complicated and compelling characters in all of mainstream comics. A political and intellectually rendered anti-hero who is actively interested in saving the ecosystem? Very cool stuff.
