Pam is planting a few things for a stranger. She wants to help life proliferate. Ivy wants life to proliferate too, but for HER that means killing off everyone on the planet, including Pam. To complicate matters, Pam and Ivy are the same person. The inner conflict continues in Poison Ivy #3. Writer G. Willow Wilson offers Pam a chance to do some good that doesn’t involve the more...genocidal end of her personality in an issue that beautifully blooms across the page with the art of Marcio Takara and colorist Arif Prianto. The bright spot in an otherwise bleakly comic drama lends poignant contrast to the rest of the series thus far.

Pam’s in a rental somewhere east of Idaho. It’s been a long journey. She awakens from a dream that could be a nightmare (or the other way around) to find herself greeted by the woman she’s renting from. The woman in question offers to give her a break on her bill if she helps out around a garden that’s in seriously bad shape. Pam knows more than a little about plants. The woman in question is about to get more help than she could possibly imagine. Pam could stick around to take in her inevitable success with the garden, but she’s dying, and she’s got work to do. And there are demons that are haunting her.

Wilson’s walk with the beautiful monster of Poison Ivy continues to wind its way west with interestingly idiosyncratic results. Wilson gives Pamela Isley a garden to work with. It’s a simple gift that could have been rather breezily dull on the page. Wilson deftly avoids the full in exploring the dramatic dichotomies of Poison Ivy in a story that gives her a chance to be a hero for a small yard of greenery while she’s haunted by the horrors that plague her...and the horrors that she’s beginning to visit on the rest of the world. 

The art team makes the journey to Idaho a memorable one. Takara’s work with nuanced drama is given a bit of a workout here. Existential exhaustion in a shower brilliantly captures the emotional fatigue of a woman who is heading off to essentially commit genocide/suicide. Elsewhere there’s a slight smile as she hears a botanist on TV talking about something she knows all too well. Outside of that, there’s a gorgeous synthesis between Takara’s composition and Prianto’s colors in bigger landscapes. There’s a GORGEOUS full-page splash of Pamela planting a tree on the thirteenth page that could be a poster it’s so good. 

This really just needs to keep going. Seriously. This is SUCH a cool road trip with a beautiful and gorgeously conflicted monster hero. Idaho is pretty far west, but I mean...she could head south and get in a little bit of sightseeing and infection along the Rockies. Maybe cruise through Southern California. Stroll through Gateway City and spend some time spreading spores in wine country on her way up to Seattle. I mean...she could do that, right? (I totally think she could do that.) This is too fun to end as quickly as it’s going to. 

Grade: A+