Poison Ivy vol. 1: The Virtuous Cycle

Things haven’t been going well for Pamela Isely as of late.  Where she was once Queen Ivy, connected to the Green and with limitless power over plant life, she has now been shorn of her godhood by being placed back in a normal body to preserve her mind.  Despondent over the loss of the power she once possessed, she now has a new goal to pursue in life:  The elimination of the human race.  It’s a big goal, but she’s got some friendly fungus to help her pull this off.  All she needs to do is just find a way to spread it out far enough and then nature will take its course.  It’s a solid plan that will hopefully survive the emergence of any shadowy and/or green figures from her past.

Originally greenlit as a six-issue miniseries, then extended to a twelve-issue maxiseries, and now an actual ongoing series set to run as long as writer G. Willow Wilson (or sales) dictates, “Poison Ivy” is as unlikely a success story as you’ll see coming out of DC comics these days.  I’ve been waiting to read this first volume in paperback for a while, and I’m glad that I waited.  While its multiple lifetime extensions implied that it was doing something right, I can’t say that this series offers a whole lot in the way of surprises.  It’s a solid antihero story that does a good job of getting you to understand its protagonist’s mindset, but it doesn’t take things further than that.

There are plenty of things to help recommend this first volume, however.  Ivy’s casual ruthlessness is generally fun to see in action as the people she subjects to gruesome deaths are generally deserving of them.  Her struggle to reconcile her former godhood with her current personhood also works and the conflict against the main villain reaches a satisfying conclusion here.  Marcio Takara also provides wonderfully lush art that captures the beauty of nature its protagonist wants to preserve, while also being good as showing us its more horrific side as well.  This is all good enough to make me want to see where “Poison Ivy” goes from here, even if I didn’t get as much as I was expecting to out of this first volume.