A look back at Silver Age Poison Ivy

[espanolbot]

Skipping forward a touch from out looks at earlier DC superheroes and villains, we come to Pamela Isley, aka Poison Ivy, who was introduced in Batman 181 back in 1966.

The story begins in at an exhibition about the three most dangerous supervillainesses in Gotham, though this being the 1960s, Bruce and Dick are more focused on how hot they are.



Despite being dazed by the flashbulbs, Bruce ducks away to swap into his Batman suit, where he's promptly beaten up by some hired goons Ivy paid $100 to beat up anyone who tries to exit the building.

Ivy's plan to become Public Enemy Number 1 (and to snag Batman and/or Bruce Wayne) begins proper, in a way which is... a touch convoluted.


The supervillainesses converge at the meeting place, and their henchmen immediately begin brawling, closely followed by Batman and Robin who join in the melee. The Public Enemies try to flee Batman, only to bump into Ivy.




This is arguably the only time in the story Ivy actually uses any plant powers, and she's not exactly that villainous either, coming across as more of a poseur more interested in manipulating men and having the title of Public Enemy Number One more than her later incarnations.

Interestingly, a lot of what he think of as the modern version of Ivy (plant-powers, an origin linked with the Floric Man etc.) comes from Neil Gaiman of all people, with first a peak at the revamped version in his Vertigo Black Orchid series, in which the titular plant-based hero goes to Arkham to ask Ivy some questions.

This was followed up by the story Pavane, which I've posted bit of before, which goes into more detail regarding her sense of detachment from regular people, as well as her somewhat predatory attitude towards sex.

In terms of shifts from her origin to her depiction in the present? Well, Ivy in the beginning was something of a flat character, who was apparently introduced as a replacement for the increasingly sympathetic Catwoman, following the rise of the feminist movement and the demand for more female villains. Somewhat unfortunately Ivy finds herself rooted in misogynistic archetypes (she manipulates men with her looks! *gasp*), which depending upon the writer can be used in either a good or bad manner.

Later portrayals introduced a ecological motive for her crimes (as opposed to purely financial gain), which was a feature which stuck more firmly, but like her sexuality how sympathetic this made her varies wildly upon the writer. During No Man's Land, for example, she was shown to be willing to raise and protect orphans who "respected the Green", which humanized her to an extent (ditto her friendship/romance with Harley Quinn), while at the same time making the times where she snapped all the more frightening.

Such as the time in Gotham Central, where two corrupt cops accidentally kill one of her charges while trying to rob a drug dealer, only to end up getting lured into her park while under the assumption that she was actually wanting to hire them for henchmen work. Effectively they managed to get away with the actual murder from a legal sense, as they bribed some of the CSI guys to deliberately mislabel the victim's personal effects so they'd get lost in storage... Only for the girl's stuff to end up being the "important evidence" that "Black Mask" wanted stolen from the evidence locker.





Ivy's complicated, but her depiction in different forms of media isn't exactly... consistant. Some writers play more to the feminist angle, others more on the exploitative side of things, others have her an either an environmentalist terrorist or merely someone who wants people to be more considerate when it comes to plant life, some have her be isolated, others have similarly damaged people getting drawn to her etc.

There is definitely a lot of material for them work with if they wanted, what with potential themes of agency, objectivication, alienation, sexuality, and such. Seems to be more of a market for umpteen Joker stories than ones about how creepy it is that people in-universe are willling to exploit a severely mentally ill woman for sexual or financial gain (such as the Birds of Prey Arkham guard who happily admits to selling candid photos of her showering to tabloid newspapers) though.
 

Comments

[janegray]

Great post :)

[skjam]

The Floronic Man connection first came up in Wonder Woman, I think.

[lucean]

For me, one of the biggest challenges with Ivy is that a lot of writers, and to be fair readers, want to make her this misguided person who can still be saved, and I keep wondering how much of that is influenced by the fact that she is a woman. That seems to prevent them from truly elevating her to the one of the big monsters of Gotham at the moment.

[espanolbot]

That's the thing, the fact that she's misguided shouldn't really prevent her from being scary. In terms of physical power, she's definitely one of, if not THE, most powerful of Batman's superpowered foes, the fact that she's somewhat capricious only adds to how she really should be more intimidating to everyday people in the DCU.

I don't know, the fact that people seem to want to lessen her crimes because she's a woman seems to be connected to a whole mess of issues that get attached to her over the yeahs. Like how she's not really taken serious as a threat BECAUSE people think that as an attractive woman she can't be dangerous.

Catwoman and Harley get this too, now that I think about it. They generally get depicted as being a lot nicer than you'd expect (well... Selina's not too bad, Harley kills people on a pretty frequent basis though).

[leoboiko]

Harley and the Joker really illustrate the point. Both of them start as more or less goofy clown-themed gangsters for a young audience. As the characters found themselves thrown into "mature" comics/movies, one of them became a still-goofy, exceedingly cute fetishistic sex symbol, a redeemably ambiguous character that's sometimes a villain, sometimes an antihero, sometimes even a downright hero. The other became a serial-killer one-note murder machine all about *cof* failed attempts at being *cof* Scary Because Insane, with the mass killings and skin-peeling and so on.

Guess which one's the guy and which's the gal. Can you imagine it the other way around?

[lucean]

To be fair, Harley is an incredibly difficult character from that perspective as she was also written to be an extremely abusive relationship. So I can easily see why there themes going there where people want this to be a heroic figure who is able to leave that relationship behind.

[espanolbot]

The biggest example of this lack of meshing between Harley taking part in Joker crimes (like, her assisting him kidnapping babies in the No Man's Land finale to "kill Gotham's hope") and her being a loveable, Deadpool-ish antiheroine was probably that one-shot that they had just prior to her current solo series.

They go from her killing hundreds of kids by giving them games consoles boobytrapped with explosives (on an issue published on September the 11th, no less) to her next appearance being about her making beaver jokes and rescuing small animals from their horrible owners.

With Ivy that kind of contrast works, as she's meant to be nice when her mood suits her while still being a horrible person of mass destruction. With Harley though... As one of the above people said, she originated in a kid's show, and that's something which kind of sticks with her regularless of how the creators try to make her edgy. Harley being grimdark (or comparing her vagina to a clown car as she did in that one Suicide Squad issue) doesn't... work for me.

[lucean]

Yeah, the presentation of Poison Ivy is a mess and, for me, it seems to constantly come back to her being a woman. The best example of this I can remember was years ago when they were doing the Joker's Asylum stories and I read the interview of the writer who explained that the thing that sets Ivy apart from the other villlains is that she is a woman and thus has that sexual tension with Batman. It was a great story, but that interview was ghastly.

And I agree completely that Ivy has all the tools to be presented as one of the true megabads for Batman, but they constantly skirt around it by either trying to make her someone really not that bad or just focusing on her as a seductive force.

Actually in my original comment I almost pointed this is true to all female Bat-Villains. To me, the worst example was the pushback when they were trying to make Talia al-Ghul one of the new shadow big bads. I will admit there were writing issues, but to me there was this constant undertone in the pushback on how could mother do something like that or how could someone who once cared for Batman do something like that. And in the end, some writer just came along and undid all that menace they were trying to add to Talia.

[leoboiko]

Adding to that, she's an eco-terrorist, which plays into lots of people's environmental guilt. I think many see ecologists as fundamentally well-intentioned, and the terrorist variety as terribly misguided but still capable of good and perhaps redeemable. (Gender—and prettiness—is definitely a factor, I agree.)

[lbd_nytetrayn]

It's more the former stuff you mention than the gender for me. I sympathize with her plight, but not her methods and sometimes ruthlessness. (I sort of appreciate the latter in the second scans above, though.)

[janegray]

The problem is that, aside from the Joker and Zsasz and a few others, the "big monsters of Gotham" in general shouldn't be monsters.

Seriously, I most definitely would NOT want to read a story where, say, Two-Face murders a baby by giving it tetanus to spite its parents (something Joker did).

Two-Face, Riddler, Penguin, Killer Croc, Ventriloquist, Deadshot, and so on and on. They are all villains, all criminals. They all do bad things. But they are not supposed to be unforgivable monsters, and Batman himself does not think they are irredeemable (in particular, Batman really goes out of his way to try and redeem Two-Face, never losing hope that one day he'll be good again).

Making Batman's general villains into monsters just backfires. There have been virtually no stories with the Mad Hatter, who used to be a perfectly fine and interesting villain, after a story had him kidnap little girls to sell them into sexual slavery to pesophiles. He was basically ruined as a character, or at least made toxic for a long time.

There is a female villain who is monstruos: her name is Jane Doe and she is 100% horrible. I have never seen a single story where she is portrayed sympathetically, because she is really as bad as Zsasz.

But Ivy is not like that. She is a Well-Intentioned Extremist (she can literally talk to plants, from her pov they are sentient creatures), and by definition she is not supposed to be wholly villainous. I don't want to see her "elevated" to the status of monster any more than I want to see Killer Crock attack a kindergarten to feast on toddlers.

[tigerkaya]

At this point DC should bring back Lockup.

[lucean]

But you are arguing something completely different. When I discuss, I mean the big villains that are presented as those truly defining villains that push Batman to the limit. And at the moment, Ivy isn't one of those.

Saying she is a Well-Intentioned Extremist is kind of generous as she has been constantly shown to be capable horrific deeds for plant life. Yet, the discussion and argument here is that because she is a woman, they are not committing as a villain. For example, Two-Face is a villain in the stories, there's no question on that.

[janegray]

Saying she is a Well-Intentioned Extremist is kind of generous as she has been constantly shown to be capable horrific deeds for plant life.

She definitely has. But again, she can actually talk with plants, as far as she is concerned they are sentient beings. And those "sentient" beings, her friends and family, are being murdered on a mass scale.

As cold, violent, horrible, ruthless and destructive she is (and she most definitely is all those things up to 11), it's hard to ignore the fact that her goal is explicitly to save "sentient" beings from mass murder.

Two-Face is a very sympathetic character, and one the hero always hopes to redeem. But, generally, his goal in the stories is to acquire wealth and power. That's inherently more villainous than Ivy's goal, even if for all intents and purposes their methods are the same.

I'm not saying the writers aren't being influenced by the common bias that women are inherently nicer and less dangerous than men. I'm saying there is more to it than that. Sexism certainly contributed, but you shouldn't dismiss the fact that, as Leoboiko said, Ivy's character inherently appeals to people's environmental guilt.

[michaelsaint]

Great post. I really like both sets of scans you had from the Silver Age and Modern comics.

It seems as if every other writer likes to put their twist or spin on Ivy (they tend to do the same thing to Harley too :( ). I really wish they stick to the deeply emotional and strong version of her - somewhat like the version in Batman:TAS.

There was a post earlier this summer about Ivy that I liked as well.
http://scans-daily.dreamwidth.org/6245637.html

[icon_uk]

Though primarily known for using toxins (and being immune to same) and mind control chemicals (She once took control of Wayne Enterprises by "accidentally" kissing each member of the board over a period of time so that she could make them sign over control to her), Ivy was well versed in creating plant-animal hybrids long before her Black Orchid appearance (Which had her incredibly plant pet with the cat's mouth thing), especially human ones, turning at least one former lover into a plant creature to stop batman catching her.

Her mental control over plants and their growth though, yeah, that was a late addition.

[icon_uk]

Oh, and of course, Dick did get his wish a few years later when the three ladies finally DID return.



Which led to the memorable exchange....

[lbd_nytetrayn]

I'd swear that was an s_d reference.

[icon_uk]

It was actually a running gag.

I think three different stories from three different writers had the villains use the same line, with different responses (slightly nonplussed, a resigned "Sigh" and then this. :)

[lyricalswagger]

Yeah, I was just getting curious if they ever brought them back in any form.

[sarahnewlin]

I won't lie, I thought she would have been perfect on the BoP team, but we all saw how that turned out...

[icon_uk]

She worked quite well as a member of the Ostrander Suicide Squad.

[mrstatham]

Mmmhmm, funny what editorial mandates and ridiculous amounts of oversight, plus insistence from other creative teams can do. That BOP book from when the New52 launched was really, really solid; great mixup of characters, interesting plot, and then they shoehorned Babsgirl in there, pulled Ivy out so she could appear in Death of the Family's Detective Comics tie-in, pushed the notion of Starling being a traitor with no real chance of coming back, etc, etc. Wasted opportunity.

[supermanda]

God, all of this.

I loved the New 52 run of the BoP, and it went down the drain, and fast.

[miss_abnormal]

I've always wondered if Thorn (one of Jay Garrick's villains and Alan Scott's wife and mother of his children) had any sort of influence over the character of Poison Ivy. Thorn had plant-controlling powers, had near-identical looks to Ivy (down to the red hair, although Ivy's seems to change from blood-red to more orange and vice-versa), and was a botanist. Was there some sort of creative connection between them or was it all just one big coincidence?

[jkcarrier]

I believe both were created by Robert Kanigher, so it may well have been a case of him (consciously or subconsciously) recycling his old ideas.

[miss_abnormal]

I checked around, and the Robert Kanigher Thorn is actually the SECOND Thorn (back when DC was trying to reinvent various Golden Age characters for the "modern" era of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s). The second Thorn (Rhosyn Forrest) didn't have any powers. The first one (Rose Canton) had all the features I mentioned above and was created by John Broome and Carmine Infantino.

[lieut_kettch]

Modern-day Tiger Moth and Dragonfly kinda look like palette-swapped versions of Helena Wayne Huntress and Phantom Lady. And Silk Spider's costume looks like it belongs to Zatanna or Silver Age Black Widow

[lego_joker]

Few of Batman's A-list villains had glamorous debuts, but honest to God, I think Ivy's is the only one I'd call an objectively bad *story*. If I remember right, this was written by Robert Kanigher long after he'd stopped giving a crap about anything other than his precious war comics, and it shows. Ivy barely does anything evil, the stakes are never made clear, and the entire thing basically meanders around and around until the page-count is up, never building anything close to momentum.

Poor, poor Pam. Every hand against you, even from the beginning.

[alicemacher]

Some writers play more to the feminist angle

An interesting take on the character, along those lines, was in the Elseworlds story Batman of Arkham, set in the early twentieth century, with Bruce Wayne's day job being the chief psychiatrist at the asylum. This version of Ivy, who appears in only one scene, is neither a master of seduction, nor an eco-terrorist; nor, if I recall correctly, does she have any plant-based powers or gimmicks. Rather, Pamela's in Arkham because she's a suffragette (just as some leading suffragettes in real life were punished) and because she refuses to dress modestly. At one point she tears off her Edwardian dress during a session with Bruce, revealing a bustier under it. She does this not to seduce him, but as an act of defiance.

[supermanda]

This was such a great post.

Ivy is definitely not consistent, and that's something I picked up on after reading her mini-series that was released in January.

[jkcarrier]

Looking over Ivy's chronology confirms my recollection that she didn't actually make that many appearances, pre-Crisis. And a lot of those were in group settings, like the Secret Society. That may be why she's so inconsistent: She simply didn't have enough stories early on to firmly establish a "classic" version. It really wasn't until the Animated Series of the '90s that she really became an A-list Bat-villain.

[indy2012]

Oh gosh what a delightful post!

Ivy was my access point into comic books as a little gay 9-year-old. I walked into a Walden's Books one day and saw the cover of Batman #568. A hellish Clayface was screaming in the background with a darkly-clad manly Bats trying to free Ivy from clay. What struck me was Ivy with her flamboyant leaf and tights getup and flaming red hair. And I thought how cool it was that such an unabashedly feminine and fabulous figure could exist in such a dark and hypermasculine world and be able to play with the boys by her own rules and style.



I, too have noticed Ivy's highly-variant appearances and depictions over the years. My favorite Ivy story in the comics has to be Ann Nocenti's Batman & Poison Ivy: Cast Shadows where Nocenti takes all of the best elements of her varied characterizations and presents a rich, hybridized Ivy who is fabulous, seductive, powerful, intellectual, brilliant, sassy, serious, conflicted, sick, and damaged all at once, i.e. a real person.

[janegray]

My favorite Ivy story in the comics has to be Ann Nocenti's Batman & Poison Ivy: Cast Shadows

I've never read that story. If you still have the issue, could you please post some scans? I'd love to check it out :D

[indy2012]

I'd be happy to!