Poison Ivy was in Death Valley, working with a tree.

[thanekos]

She heard a sound outside her tent.

She opened the flap.

Batman appeared before her.

" Dr. Isley. "

She tried to drive him away. He vanished.

She asked if he was here to take her in.

" No. "

She caught him.

" I'm *unh*.. I'm here to ask for your help. "





(The green's because Batman's wearing his stealth rig.)



(Batman's countermeasure did not wholly eliminate Freeze's bacteria.)



The men after Batman and Ivy closed in on them.

Ivy pressed Batman on something she'd realized, looking at the sample he'd given her.

" .. she's already dead, isn't she? ' Lilly. ' Just looking at the worm, I can see she must be. The speed of its growth.. I'd say around thirteen hours.

" She died, and they likely incinerated her just as you arrived. I'm right, aren't I? "

" .. "



(The countdown flashbacks started from thirteen, with Lilly's smoking skull.)



(In this, Ivy's control is call-and-response.)

Batman and Ivy fought off the apparent Blackhawks (the former, asking who they were, got only their insignia as an answer).

Flame from their weapons during the fight caught Ivy's tree.

Watching it burn, she told Batman to leave.

" I'm sorry. " he said, peeling the wax off his lips.

" Wax lips?

" So why did you fight for me then? "



" Wait. "



(Her vines are handy things.)



(Pencils, inks, and colors're by Tula Lotay.

Pagecount's ~7 of 22 from All-Star Batman #7.)

Comments

I'm really glad that they are adding complexity back to Ivy

[lucean]

Even here, where her motivations are fleshed out, her current self is still doing very questionable things and has a darker edge to it.

Something I've disliked about the Harley Quinn appearances with Ivy is that to me they have really defanged the character and reduced one of Batman's most complex villains in to this easy-to-like character.

[janegray]

I love this. Both the art and the writing.

[spider_man6]

I love Ivy's appearance. New and different.

[locuatico]

Something i often wonders about Ivy is, how much of her core traits (being a feminist and an enviromentalist) shifted from being "bad" to "good".
I don't mean how much of her character was changed to be more sympathetic, but more how much audiences shifted from finding her character traits character traits of a villain to "why is she supposed to be a villain, again?" if i make any sense.

[an_idol_mind]

You do make sense. However, IIRC, Ivy was more or less a traditional thief in her first appearance (albeit with her plant theme and chloroform kiss). Without checking, I would suspect that her feminist/environmentalist traits were added in later as Batman's rogues gallery became generally more nuanced and sympathetic as a whole, rather than those being traits that were "bad" before but are now "good."

[locuatico]

I believe that at least the feminism aspect was part of the character since the conception

[icon_uk]

Her first appearance back in 1966, was due to her outrage that she was not even ranked in the list of the top three most wanted female criminals (Dragonfly, Silken Spider and Tiger Moth beat her) and was determined to make it to the top. So it was feminism of a sort.

But then in that issue Batman also uttered the immortal line "I was thinking of how cute Poison Ivy is-- I hate to put such a beautiful doll behind bars!"

[locuatico]

that does support my original point: her feminism wasn't something we were supposed to think of as a redeeming quality, but rather to see it in a negative light.
In that context, it makes sense Batman would say that line in that specific comic, the comic wasn't trying to show feminism in a positive light (intentionally or unintentionally is to be argued)

ETA: there is also the fact it was written by a guy in the sixties. while male feminists are not something "new", I doubt Robert Kanigher was the most versed in feminist ideology and philosophy.

[janegray]

Interesting question. Now I'm wondering that too.

I remember one elseworld story where Ivy was imprisoned as criminally insane just because she was a suffragette. Can't remember the name though.

[icon_uk]

The Batman of Arkham

[icon_uk]

She's changed a lot, mostly in the 1980's I think. Until then she was entirely self-absorbed, using her control powers to make her life easier (Perhaps most memorably taking subtle control, one by one, of the Board of Wayne Enterprises, so they'd hand control of it over to her and also be completely unable to reveal her influence, which she did solely for the money it would bring her). She had skills at producing human/plant hybrids, and had no real regard for any life bur her own, and didn't mentally control plants the way she does now.

Later versions, especially after the Gaiman Black Orchid series (Which was, I think, the first to tie her story into Alec "Swamp Thing" Holland and Jason "Floronic Man" Woodrue) and BTAS made her more interested in the plants vs humanity side of things (with her siding with the former over the latter every time).

From there the line between "human hating plant obsessive" and "eco-acrtivist/terrorist" became a little more blurred, leaving writers more options to explore a more complicated character.

[locuatico]

huh.
still, I still wonder if the "feminism" part of the character was something we once were supposed to see in a negative light and that changing because it stopped having the same connotation and became a positive trait.

[indy2012]

When I still hung around on the DC message boards in the early 2000s before eventually being turned off by the misogynistic, homophobic, transphobic, and racist views held by some of the members, I remember one particular thread with the discussion of the "sexiest" woman in the Batman books. The women discussed were Barbara Gordon, Talia al Ghul, Huntress, Harley, Ivy, and Selina.

The 2 that were touted by most members as the sexiest were Selina and Talia with Talia coming out by a head (hahaha?). The reasons given were that Talia and Selina were most in-line with Batman's mission, and the reason that Talia was "better" was because she would allow Bruce to place his mission first and her second. Selina came in second because "she would never play second-fiddle." And I think that Harley came third because of how devoted she was to "Mistah J." What I remember most though was that Ivy and Barbara Gordon were often rated the lowest. Babs was often called a host of derogatory names and criticized for calling Bruce out from time-to-time. Ivy was dismissed as a "stupid lesbian." So the 2 characters on the list who were the most independent or removed from having sexy times with Bruce and having motivations outside of the men in their lives were seen as the least desirable.

So it would not surprise me at all if the feminism existent in Ivy's stories turned off a lot of folks.

[riddler13]

K-I-S-S-I-N-G


(Sorry :p)

[lbd_nytetrayn]

Going by the comments, I guess I'm not in the majority wanting Ivy to come around to being a good guy, or at least more anti-hero.