Poison Ivy #1 // Review
It's beautiful. It all is. A kiss with Harley. The loving punch delivered to an aggressive stranger. The couple rotting through fungus in the back of a stolen van on a highway to Seattle. It's all so beautiful. Writer G. Willow Wilson's new Poison Ivy #1 is so many things. With the aid of artist Marcio Takara and colorist Arif Prianto, Wilson delivers one of the more promising debuts for a new mainstream series in quite some time. It's an echo-nihilist's dark dream dancing across the page in vivid color. Ivy wants to kill humanity. (We’ve got it coming. Humanity has been awful to the planet.) She's a mainstream DC villain, so there's little question that she won't win. The way Wilson writes, it's really, really difficult not to want her to succeed.
A couple of ranchers run into some trouble. They find a few cattle in a lifeless mess of fungus on their property. An incredibly attractive redhead is responsible. The two guys think she's with Greenpeace. If they were right, things might have gone differently for them. Further on down the road, Ivy's having a drink at a rural bar by the side of the road. A couple of guys want to have some fun with her. They do...but not in the way they expect. Ivy can't stick around, though. She wants to wipe out the human race...and she's only got a limited window of time to kill everyone off.
Wilson renders an irresistibly charming Ivy to the page. She's angry. She's upset with everyone, including herself. She's ready to tear it all down. A part of her wants to die, but she wants to take out the entire human race with her. The thoughts of a genocidal, suicidal superhuman are delivered to the page in an extended letter written to the woman Ivy loves. The whole premise is so enchantingly horrifying on so many levels. In the hands of Wilson, the psyche of Ivy is utterly captivating. She loves the people she hates. She hates the people she loves. It's all so cleverly crafted.
Takara and Prianto make a small, unassuming redhead look positively radiant in the bleary luridness of a road trip to premeditated oblivion. There's confident exhaustion on the face of Ivy as she rolls across the rural northwest. Prianto catches a symphony of reds in Ivy's hair that play against the earth tones of the countryside and the hushed shadows of a tiny bar somewhere between one place and the other. Takara and Prianto play to a beautiful spectrum of moods, from kisses to fistfights to silent tensions and fantastic horror. Through it all, they deliver the radiant power that resonates through the title character's presence.
Poison Ivy has had quite a few moments to shine over the years, but in Wilson's hands, its different. Wilson's walk with Ivy makes it seem kind of strange that she hasn't been more of a prominent character in her own long-running series. Ivy is incredibly appealing in the opening of something that feels like it could be remarkably special.
