Knight Terrors: Poison Ivy #2 // Review
Harley is happy. Pamela is happy. Harley and Pamela are happy. Why wouldn't they be happy? They're smiling and eating meat in the suburbs over a nice suburban dinner table in a nice suburban kitchen. There's a picket fence outside and a smiling sun. Everything is perfect, and everyone is so happy. Granted: it IS a nightmare, but what could be more perfect? Pamela finds out in Knight Terrors: Poison Ivy #2. Writer G. Willow Wilson continues a journey through the nightmare realm of an eco-terrorist anti-hero with penciler Atagun Ilhan, inker Mark Morales, and colorist Arif Prianto.
After eating, Harley leads Ivy out into the yard, where she spots a dandelion. Its little head is puffy and ready to spread its seeds. Harley wants to kill it. Harley is OBSESSED with killing the dandelion. This snaps Ivy into reality. The real Harley wouldn't care. The real Harley would name it and talk to it. The real Harley isn't obsessed with weeding in the suburbs. Ivy knows that she has to get out of the nightmare. She only has to figure out how she's going to do it. There's someone else on the block who doesn't seem to think that any of this is normal. She's going to head out and have a word with her…
Wilson nails some of the more intriguing things that make Poison Ivy such a relatable character. Anyone who shares her concern with the delicate biosphere feels more than a little strange next to so many people who are so conspicuously happy...consuming amidst one of the largest mass extinctions in the history of the planet. We all just...smile and go along with it even though we know something is fundamentally wrong. Wilson nails that element of Ivy's personality...that total eco-sensitivity that makes her so heroic. Of COURSE, her greatest fear would be living in the suburbs and just being so...happy...like everyone else. They MUST be happy, right? They ARE smiling. Everyone is smiling.
llhan, Morales and Prianto vividly render the twisted, rubbery happy-happy of Poison Ivy's nightmare world. The big-eyed happiness of painfully forced smiles is amplified by Prianto's garish colors. There's such a powerful and profound sense of overwhelming intensity on EVERYTHING. Though there ARE bits of traditional horror lurking around the edges of the panel, the art team is at its best simply presenting the spectacle of the excruciating happiness that is Poison Ivy's greatest nightmare.
There's an absolute purity of vision here. It has strength all its own. Simply allow Ivy's nightmare to run its course in a non-complicated and straightforward way without trying to amplify anything. And it becomes its own breathtakingly simple analysis of a very complex and conflicted person. Wilson's long-term progression of Ivy's psyche has been fascinating to watch. She explores that here as well. The true identity of the polo-shirted Batman of Ivy's nightmares is a clever echo of something that Wilson has been echoing around the back corners of her characterization since she started working with the character.
