Poison Ivy #19: Nothing More Terrifying Than Reality

Trigger Warning: Poison Ivy #19 focuses on an abusive relationship. 

Over the last eighteen issues, Poison Ivy’s creators have offered readers a steady stream of psychedelic horror. In the newest installment, the series’ trademark trippy neons and fungal horror have been stripped away. Reality’s horrors are laid bare. In relation to his earlier work, Marcio Takara’s art for Poison Ivy #19 is incredibly restrained. Ivy’s world usually feels ambiguous, with panels and their contents looking liquid and subjects merging into one another. Boundaries are permeable: everything and everyone is connected and that in itself is terrifying. In Poison Ivy #19, all of that fluidity is gone after page one, giving way to a world whose boundaries are both rigid and real. Colorist Arif Prianto likewise takes a naturalistic approach to coloring the issue’s mundane settings. While the comic’s subject is horrifying, that horror is no longer being held at arm’s length. Instead, it’s uncomfortably close. 

On its face, Poison Ivy #19 is part one of a new “true” origin story for the titular anti-villain. At its heart, however, is the story of a female student (Pamela Isley) stuck in an abusive relationship with her professor (Jason Woodrue). (In all honesty, some potential readers might benefit from a trigger warning as similar narratives like Lessons in Chemistry and another Ivy origin story Poison Ivy: Thorns have done in recent years.) When this series has previously approached pressing social issues like COVID-19 or reproductive rights, it has done so through metaphor. While G. Willow Wilson’s prose is still compelling, her narrative is uncompromisingly direct. Takara’s uncharacteristically restrained artwork also places more emphasis on Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou’s lettering, with Ivy’s narration literally dripping with disdain towards her abuser. And with the series’ sci-fi/horror elements taking a firm backseat, it is all but impossible to ignore Woodrue’s pattern of abuse and its real world parallels.