Beware of Dogs. And Plants.
Written By: Amy Chu
Art By: Clay Mann, Seth Mann,
Jonathan Glapion and Art Thibert, Ulises Arreola
Letters By:
Janice Chiang
Cover Price: $2.99
Release Date: February 17, 2016
*Non-Spoilers and Score At The Bottom*
Man, wherever Poison Ivy
goes, trouble seems to follow. She tries to save the environment by taking down
polluters, and she gets sent to an insane asylum. She takes a job at Gotham
City Botanical Gardens, and her mentor dies of poisoning. She poisons some guy
that pisses her off, and he gets poisoned. Okay, maybe that was all her fault.
Point is, she leads a complicated life, and it’s made even more complex by her
own weird narcissism and set of ethics. All she wants to do is create
animal-plant hybrid monsters, is that so wrong? The Saga of Miss Swamp Thang
continues in issue #2 of Poison Ivy:
Cycle of Life and Death, and I reviewed it, and you can read on to confirm
the existence of that review!
Explain It!:
Down at the Botanical
Gardens, the Gotham City Police have cordoned off the scene while detectives
ask staff about the untimely death of Dr. Luisa Cruz. No one is thinking
homicide, however, because they know she worked with the very toxic Yew tree.
Pamela “Poison Ivy” Isley notes to herself that their shared research has been
stolen—I think it must have been that Living Fossil plant that they were using
to study life extension. That’s okay, though: Isley’s got three more back at
her apartment. Administrator Victor Lee and Dr. Eric Grimley, Chairman of the
research department are speaking anxiously with with a cherubic-looking
detective, they’re very interested in keeping this accident out of the news. We
learn the last guy to see her alive was Daharn Bapta, who looks to be an intern
with a purple streak and a lot of product in his hair—he has nothing special to
report. Dr. Isley doesn’t believe this was an accident, but when the fleshy
detective asks her if anything was stolen, Victor steps in and stops his
questioning before she can answer. What is Victor trying to hide?
The detective asks Pamela
what she was up to yesterday, and she can’t really explain that she was beating
the snot out of some bikers with Harley Quinn. Luckily, a creepy colleague named
Winston pops up and says they were out to a movie, and plus he’s fucking her.
This satisfies the police, despite Pamela looking like a four-alarm hottie and
Winston looking like the human version of an English sheep dog. Pamela goes
back to her spacious and plant-filled apartment to do some research, which
appears to be staring at Luisa Cruz’s Facebook profile. She thinks something’s
fishy here, and worries that whoever killed Cruz knows that Pamela is actually
Poison Ivy—this sort of reverses what I wondered last issue, which was how a
convicted killer with the power to manipulate plants got a job at the Botanical
Gardens, but I am a little skeptical. No one knows who she is? One would think
she’d be pretty famous, particularly in the floral community, but okay—I’ll
accept it. The chubby detective, whose name is O’Shea, is at the GCPD looking
up Pamela Isley’s Facebook profile, and it seems her record was wiped out. This
raises Detective O’Shea’s flabby hackles, but I’ll accept it for the sake of
story.
The Botanical Gardens crew
decide that a perfect memorial to Dr. Cruz would be to plant a public garden as
a form of “urban renewal,” a term at which Dr. Isley scoffs. While pulling
weeds and raking used crack vials into neat piles, two vicious pit bulls burst
through the gate and attack Pamela and Daharn, so Pamela hyper-grows some
plants to restrain the ravenous beasts. Isley goes to speak to the owner, who
is an asshole so Pamela kills him by growing a plant into his body through his
asshole and out of his mouth. The next day, Pamela confronts Victor about his
secrecy—he must knows Cruz didn’t accidentally poison herself. Victor Lee just
smiles and reveals he knows she is Poison Ivy, so she’d better fuck off and be
quiet if she wants to keep her job. Then there’s a scene with a very awkward
flirting attempt by Daharn, who reveals to Pamela that he lied to the cops when
he said he was the last to see Dr. Luisa Cruz; instead, he got the call and
went down to audition for Gotham’s Got Talent. Then he tells Pamela he can’t
kill flies, and somehow this doesn’t increase her interest in him! Women! Go
figure.
Pamela goes back to her
apartment, where her experimental animal-plant hybrids are ready to hatch, or
whatever, and she pulls them out as glistening, greenish babies. Their pods actually
look like gigantic, gross oozing roses. I like the way all of these scenes are
rendered, when Poison Ivy is tending to her plant babies. And I’m sure she’d
like to send announcements to all of her colleagues, but at that very moment
Daharn finds Dr. Grimely, out of his wheelchair and surrounded by debris,
seemingly dead!
This mystery is expanding
at a nice pace, and I am certainly interested to keep reading, but the plotting
of this issue is pretty stiff and seems to drag at points. The art is better
than average but still a little flat for my tastes, and only shines when the
line work expands beyond a fairly typical panel structure and stretches out.
This is a good comic book, worth your time, it’s just not shit-shattering. I’ll
tell you what, though: I’d rather have six comic books of this caliber than one
shit-shattering comic book and five stinkers. And you can take that to the
bank!
Bits and Pieces
Things are opening up and
more characters are introduced as the mystery of the Botanical Gardens Killer
deepens. There’s some good personality development and some nice scenes, but
it’s tough to figure out what’s important in this book and what’s just
background information. Pamela seems to walk through the world in a daze, not
unlike some people I remember from college. Remember these people? Something
concrete would happen, like their car would break down, and they’re like, “the
universe has determined I don’t need a car, I suppose.” Pamela seems sort of
like that, except she has more disdain for humanity. And that makes me like her
a lot.
7.5/10
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