Poison Ivy #4 // Review
Dr. Pamela Isley has not picked up a shift at Amazon. (Amazon might not even exist in the DC Universe.) She has, however, picked up a shift at a place that really is A LOT like Amazon. She’s one of the world’s foremost botanists. What the hell is she doing working one of the worst jobs in the US? All becomes clear in Poison Ivy #4. Writer G. Willow Wilson and artist Marcio Takara continue their road trip with an endlessly appealing anti-hero with the aid of colorist Arif Prianto. Wilson and company usher Ivy through another blossoming of darkly comic horror drama.
It’s a distribution point. It’s the perfect place to spread the spores of death. To work at the distribution facility, of course, she will have to make her way through a job interview and tolerate the kind of hell so many people have to put up with just to make a living. She’s not going to tolerate it for long, though. Poison Ivy doesn’t have patience for anyone who takes advantage of others. Entry-level work is filled with the kind of exploitation that Ivy hasn’t had to deal with very often. Naturally, she will have some difficulty with her first shift on the job.
Wilson walks a line between wish fantasy and wish fulfillment and sophisticated socio-cultural satire. The script can tip over pretty heavily in the direction of simplistically sinister exaggeration, but not for long. Wilson has faced the challenge of finding the right villain for Ivy’s anti-hero in a way that feels balanced and even a bit nuanced. Ivy does what Ivy does, and it’s awful, but even she realizes that what she’s doing isn’t entirely right. As with previous issues, Ivy comes across with an overwhelming sense of restless fatigue. She knows she’s dying, and she’s getting one last look at the world. It’s bleakly beautiful.
The bleak beauty is captured with some sense of style by Takara and Prianto. Takara takes a long, hard look at an Amazon-like shipping facility and the people forced to inhabit it. Ivy is a strikingly beautiful earthbound ghost who is slumming it for the sake of a mild genocide. There’s a serenity about her fatigue that looks stunning. Somewhere in the midst of it, there’s a love scene. Ivy’s mind is elsewhere. Takara and Prianto’s framing of this moment is very close to its own kind of brilliance as a memory smiles in the foreground while Ivy engages in a largely empty tumble with physical passion. Very clever.
The plot develops into a kind of focus as the anti-hero finds her arch-villain in a sharply-executed fourth issue. Wilson is taking Ivy and her readers on a tour of the darker side of life in the US, but there’s room for so much more that she hasn’t had a chance to embrace. A series like this could go on for quite some time without ever quite losing momentum. Too bad it’s a mini-series.
