Knight Terrors: Poison Ivy #1. // Review
Pamela Isley didn't anticipate wanting to live in a shack in a swamp. Under the circumstances, it is probably the best place for her. And it has its own terms. However, there's something beyond the appearance of everything that seems to suggest something worse. The nightmare of a better life begins to descend on her in Knight Terrors: Poison Ivy #1. Writer G. Willow Wilson plunges Poison Ivy into her own personal hell with the aid of artist Atagun Ilhan, inker Mark Morales, and colorist Arif Prianto.
There’s a frog on Pam’s front porch. Naturally, she thinks that it’s trying to tell her something. Given her unique relationship with plants, the Earth, and life in general, it’s pretty understandable. And given all that’s happened to her lately, it’s also understandable that she would be feeling pretty tired. So, she’s going to go ahead and fall into bed, which is going to cause her to fall asleep. When she wakes up, she’s in a twisted Tim Burton version of idyllic suburbia straight out of Edward Scissorhands. She knows something is wrong. She’s going to have to figure out what it is.
Pam's life has been a kind of nightmare to begin with. And certainly, her main series is a good example of that. Wilson does a good job of imagining a fresh hell for her in a fun one-shot that ties into the bigger picture of Pam and who she is. It's pretty standard work to try to put any kind of super-villain into the popular conception of suburban heaven just to see how they react. Wilson takes the idea and runs with it in several interesting directions. It's going to be an awful experience for her. She is going to learn a little bit about herself in the process. Wilson’s inventiveness manages to avoid clichés as she does this.
Ilhan and Morales openly embrace the garish nightmare of suburban life in visuals that feel awful and twisted from the very first panel. There would be a temptation on the part of any artist to layer on the sweetness to make it look completely sanitary and innocuous at the outset. And the reveal of that can be shocking enough that it makes for an interesting experience. However, it takes a lot of guts to go in and make it look truly horrid from the start. Prianto’s colors take the twisted nature of the atmosphere and maintain a steady atmosphere straight through. Everything is handled with the classy tastefulness of a technicolor nightmare.
The Knight Terrors crossover has had mixed results from a variety of different writers in its opening week. Wilson's vision of the darkness is very impressive. She manages to avoid clichés and show an antihero’s worst nightmare of pleasant happiness. She never quite manages to dive into a biting satire on the nature of the traditional American dream. She doesn't need to. This is really more of a story about Ivy and her interior life. It’s sharp. It’s clever.
