Poison Ivy #44: Ivy Versus the Media

Poison Ivy is practically a brand new series these days. Political intrigue has become a key story theme, and  Wilson has found a way to blend contemporary political concerns with supervillain sensibilities and good old fashioned Gotham City corruption. Poison Ivy #44 brings Ivy face to face with media manipulation. And at the same time, she runs headfirst into the government’s resistance to change.

Ivy’s desire to make quick changes in Gotham is a storyline that continues from previous issues into Poison Ivy #44. Here she is motivated to restore lower level jobs, especially in the park system when she happens to see a park employee leaving their position after being laid off. Once again Ivy is reminded that she can’t make unilateral changes because Gotham also has a city council.

This point is emphasized in a splash page where Infante draws a table full of people (the city council) paying almost no attention to Ivy. This is an excellent moment in the issue where the art perfectly supports the story Wilson is telling. The visual here is perhaps a better example of the government’s inertia to make no changes than any of the dialogue Wilson writes.

The chance encounter between Ivy and the laid off park employee happens following an interaction between Ivy and the talking hill that appeared at the end of Poison Ivy #43. Aside from setting up the confrontation with the city council over jobs, this is the weakest part of Poison Ivy #44. Ivy is being warned about the growing anger of the Parliament of Trees following her murder of one of them several issues back. This is almost certainly setting up a future confrontation, but compared to everything else going on in the issue it has no heft.

News media manipulation and Ivy’s response to it is the most compelling story thread in Poison Ivy #44. This comes in two forms. The first is Ivy’s response to a hit piece on her administration where she expresses anger that her administration doesn’t have the media on her side the way previous administrations has (basically accusing the city and the news media of collusion). After that, Ivy confronts the credited writer of the hit piece only to discover that it was his bosses who turned the very legitimate article into a hit piece. The result is a story that calls to mind such media behavior in the real world.

Infante brings a lot of detail to the issue’s characters. There is variation in how much detail is applied–men more than women, old more than young. Ivy looks comparatively soft next to the various older characters she deals with in city hall and elsewhere. The art further reinforces Ivy’s struggle to bring fresh change to an entrenched system.

There is a lot of black space throughout Poison Ivy #44. Some of it is part of setting backdrops, and some of it is characters’ clothing. Most of it, though, is shadow. Prianto’s color choices in those panels creates significant contrast resulting in a lot of images popping off the page. A particularly striking example comes late in the issue as Ivy kneels on the end of the bed of a man she’s come to kill. Most of the panel is in black with the major exception being the man’s face, Ivy’s red hair, and the sunrise through the window behind her. Ivy absolutely leaps off the page, and the sunrise behind her paints her as the hero relative to the man in the dark.

Otsmane-Elhaou’s choice to not use dialogue bubbles at various points in the issue–especially when the dialogue is white text set against a field of black–adds a kind of quiet to the moment. Instead of bubbles, a portion of dialogue is clumped together as if it were in a bubble and then connected to the character (or another clump of dialogue) via a single line as a tail.