Poison Ivy #41 // Review
The Bowery. Gotham City. Late afternoon. There’s a red-haired woman in a green jumpsuit who is running down the alley. She should be focussing on survival, but all she can see is Marie’s blood. She let her anger get ahead of her and she’s killed a prominent tech guru. Now the Gotham City police are after her. She’s in serious danger. Things are going to get a whole lot worse for her in Poison Ivy #41. Writer G. Willow Wilson continues her intoxicatingly engaging run in another deeply enjoyable issue brought to page and panel by artist Davide Gianfelice. Color comes to the page courtesy of Arif Prianto.
It isn’t long before she’s waking-up in jail. The first thing she notices are the bars and the voice of some guy asking her if she’s going to vomit on his $500 shoes. She didn’t get far. They hit her with something that had been specifically formulated to neutralize her powers. Now she’s in a cell with half a dozen minor accomplices of the Falcone crime family. The guards have told them that Poison Ivy wouldn’t be missed if something happened to her. They were practically encouraging them to deal with her for them. She’s got friends, though. She’s going to have to arrange something.
Wilson has brought Poison Ivy back to Gotham City with great style and drama. What’s more: Wilson has done beautiful things with the characterization of Ivy’s current psycho-emotional state. There’s a brilliantly textured sense of personal transformation that’s been going on with Ivy over the course of Wilson’s series. Ivy’s inner emotional life comes quite vividly to the center of the panel as she’s forced to consider the unthinkable in the interest of survival: running for public office. Wilson does a strikingly clever job with the foreshadowing of what is to come in the issues ahead. It’s an exciting new turn.
Gianfelice is visually rendering Poison Ivy through a pretty vulnerable point in her life. She’s not feeling too terribly good about herself and it shows in her downcast eyes and her slumped posture throughout the issue. The dramatic rendering of Poison Ivy is never over-amplified. This would be all too easy to do given the fact that so much of the issue happens behind bars. Thankfully, Gianfelice maintains a subtle and nuanced prison drama that is given quite a bit of shadow and atmosphere thanks to Prianto’s colors.
Once again...a major turn in the life of Poison Ivy makes it totally clear that Wilson has really had a deep understanding of what makes a character work in the long-term. She’a come a great distance in the first half of her fourth year chronicling the life of Poison Ivy. Wilson has done an impressive job with the psychological continuity of Gotham City’s single most appealing character. Wilson is meeting the challenge of keeping the title character moving from conflict to conflict with grace and poise. Poison Ivy’s going to need it where she’s going. All else has failed. It’s time to run for Mayor of Gotham City.
