Knight Terrors: Poison Ivy #1 – G. Willow Wilson, Writer; Atugan Ilhan, Penciller; Mark Morales, Inker; Arif Prianto, Colorist
Ray – 8.5/10
Ray: This is one of the Knight Terrors tie-ins where the original writer continues on during the break, so this feels less like a new series and more like an event tie-in to G. Willow Wilson’s ongoing. What’s Poison Ivy’s worst fear? How about a paradise that changes who she is? Ivy goes to sleep in Slaughter Swamp, haunted by questions, and wakes up in a candy-colored suburban paradise. At first she’s horrified—suburban sprawl is an enemy of plants, after all—and her confusion only grows when she’s greeted at the door of “her” house by a Stepford-esque Harley Quinn, who can’t wait to see her wife and even baked her a pie. The hits keep coming—Batman and a pregnant Selina live next door, with Batman watering the lawn in a Bat-mask and shorts. Various Gotham villains hang out around the neighborhood, with Penguin walking his fluffy pomeranian and greeting Nightwing like old friends.
Ivy’s barriers start to break down when she sees how happy Harley is, and she soon finds herself being sucked into this strange world and forgetting her initial panic—but that’s because it might not be her nightmare. Janet finds herself in this same world, equally confused, but people don’t ready to her confusion with friendly greetings like they do to Ivy. Everyone here seems to view her as an interloper and a potential threat to their paradise, and that leads to some genuinely horrific scenes as they try to purge her like an antibody going after a foreign substance. This is the slowest-burn story in this event so far, with the horror creeping in behind the stepford smiles and bright shining sun. It’s not quite up to the level of some of Wilson’s best Poison Ivy stories, but it builds nicely on the character work she’s done with Harley and Ivy over the last year.
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GeekDad received this comic for review purposes.
