Poison Ivy #11 – G. Willow Wilson, Writer; Marcio Takara, Artist; Arif Prianto, Colorist
Ray – 8.5/10
Ray: Since the start, this series has been asking the question of who Poison Ivy is becoming—or rather, what Poison Ivy is becoming. When we last left her and her road trip companion Janet, they had joined up at a retreat run by a strange celebrity cult leader obviously inspired by the founder of “Goop.” The natural-living, hippie commune had a dark secret under the surface—they were ingesting the same fungal spores that gave Ivy her new power, but they weren’t killing them. Rather, they were helping them create a hive mind and an intense psychological and physical connection—one that manifested itself in an orgy. When we pick up, Ivy has wrested control back from the fungus, but it’s come with a side effect—Ivy is now in control of the hive mind, and now has psychic control over all the other women she was communing with, including Janet. And now she has to decide what to do with that power.
One of the big themes of this series has been the level of power Ivy holds and just how easy it is for it to corrupt someone. As she fits into her new role, she starts being tempted by the same excesses that she was engaging in at the beginning of the series. She takes on a logging camp by using the women she’s in control of as a living shield—something that nearly turns deadly when she manifests a new power in the nick of time. This was supposed to be the penultimate issue of the series in the (second) original plan, so the end of the issue nicely sets Ivy up for what would have been the last stage of her journey, but it also sort of feels like Ivy learning the same lesson again. The only real problem with this series is that it has few characters who really connect with the reader outside Ivy herself, so I’m hoping when it begins its main new arc we get to see her interact more with Harley in particular.
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GeekDad received this comic for review purposes.
