Pamela has finally settled into a perfect life in Seattle. Granted...everything isn’t totally perfect, but she DOES seem to be recovering from some of the horrors she’d been on over the course of a cross-country road trip. So naturally, things will get more than a little confusing when the love of her life shows up in Poison Ivy #9. Ivy and Harley get reacquainted in a sparkling romantic comedy issue written by G. Willow Wilson with endearing art lovingly rendered to the page by Marcio Takara and colorist Arif Prianto. 

Pam is enjoying the view from her place. She’s enjoying a cup of coffee too. Then she drops it. One page later, she’s passionately kissing Harley Quinn. Poison Ivy has been writing Harley letters for the past eight issues. As it turns out, she got them all and has been reading them on her way out to meet her. Things fit together perfectly for Ivy and Harley. They can’t last forever, though. There’s going to be something that will eventually come between them...isn’t there?

Wilson gives Ivy quite a bit of happiness this issue. Honestly, she’s had it coming. The eight issues leading into the ninth have been exquisitely rough for her. There’s plenty of room for Ivy to breathe, but there’s clearly something hanging over the happiness. Wilson knows that she doesn’t have to do much to call attention to it given how overwhelmingly dark the first eight issues of the series have been. Without the need to delicately seed the periphery with foreboding foreshadowing, Wilson is free to show off precisely what it is that Ivy sees in Harley as she playfully tumbles through a few moments in Seattle.

Takara is given an entire chapter without any sense of overt menace or traditional superhero action at all. There aren’t a whole lot of artists who could give an all-romance drama the type of intricately nuanced detail that Takara manages. It’s a whimsical little fugue between a couple of women who love each other very much, which is actually a great deal of fun to see delivered with the kind of joy Takara conjures to the page. Prianto adds depth and detail to the action with colors that beautifully shade the emotion of the moment. 

The first nine issues of the series have been a movement west. Wilson seems to be teasing a similarly extended road trip east in the chapters to come. The restless road trip format has worked quite well. All of the many little episodes that fit into a cross-country drive make for a remarkably fun format that has likely never been attempted in an extended mainstream series before. The darkness of the anti-hero’s journey out should be mirrored by the relative levity of a potential hero’s journey back over the course of the NEXT nine issues if all goes well.

Grade: A