Poison Ivy #16: Back to Normal

Month after month, Poison Ivy offers its readers a warped fun-house reflection of modern America and this month is no different. Poison Ivy #12 saw Ivy create a swift-acting vaccine to save a group of wellness retreat attendees and come face-to-face with an anti-vaxxer. Following the final days of an infected warehouse worker, Poison Ivy #16 once again invites us to see the parallels between Pam’s zombifying fungal pandemic and the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. 

Nowhere is this metaphor more blatant than when Ivy via narration describes the lamia pandemic as “born in a lab. Perfected in the overtaxed immune systems of an overworked nation.” This moment of narration shows the tensions of reading this genuinely poignant issue’s central metaphor uncritically. For example, while Ivy’s lamia pathogen was certainly concocted in a supervillain’s lab, the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic remain hotly debated. But because Poison Ivy isn’t ultimately about COVID-19 (it’s about a queer ecoterrorist turning people into mushroom zombies and regretting it), the narrative doesn’t have space to parse the hypothesis that coronavirus originated in an animal, the “lab leak” hypothesis, and the conspiracy theory of COVID-19 being a lab-grown bioweapon. (Reading the comic too literally, one might see this comic as validating the third. Mentions of the lamia fungus being originally created for mass surveillance also calls to mind “Bill Gates 5G vaccine” conspiracies now, for better or worse.)

Likewise, the issue blurs the line between overworked people with weakened immune systems and immunocompromised people (whose immune systems have been weakened due to illness/immunosuppressants). In doing so, it obscures not only that new variants have grown in immunocompromised people but the ways society continues to make immunocompromised and disabled people extremely vulnerable (e.g. getting rid of mask mandates). And because the lamia metaphor is working double-duty as a metaphor for environmental exploitation and Nature’s revenge, its implications as a coronavirus metaphor feel even murkier. All of that said, it’s nonetheless refreshing to see Poison Ivy exploring the wide-reaching effects of the ongoing pandemic in relation to capitalist exploitation. Indeed, it’s refreshing to see any comic at all confront the ongoing pandemic. One can only hope this ambitious issue sparks discussion and encourages readers to learn more outside of comics, rather than confirming their most ignorant beliefs.

The issue’s artwork, once again drawn by Marcio Takara and colored by Arif Prianto, is a pitch-perfect fit for G. Willow Wilson’s writing. While the series’ main strength continues to be its neon psychedelic horror, what makes Poison Ivy #16 so memorable is truthfully its mundane horror. As the comic follows the destruction of one man’s health and life and the repercussions on his community, the visuals often feel eerily dull, save a tickle of hot pink fungus here or there. One can only be reminded of the ongoing horrors of our own pandemic – horrors often ignored in the name of “getting back to normal.” And as the comic sees Ivy struggling to find her own normal in Gotham with Harley and Janet, unable to leave the lamia in the past, the comic becomes a vital, terrible reminder that many people need to hear: old normal no longer exists.