Batman General Discussion

The Poison Ivy comic takes a more anti-hero stance with her.

It's also recently did a new rendition of her origin that apparently white-washes her of culpability.

Boo!

I miss eco terrorist Ivy who was unrepentant about killing humans to save plants.

I just read Batman #5, where a mobster's gang beats Robin nearly to death and Batman goes completely berserk, tearing through the thugs despite taking three bullets to the shoulder.

The whitewashing of Ivy is almost as bad as the whitewashing of Harley.

“something something Floronic Man” is also how Swamp Thing found out a lot about himself.

Swamp Thing was always a Plant Person though. It makes sense that he remains above Poison Ivy in Floronic hierarchy.

I've noticed DC has been retconning a lot of villains into softies during this whole Rebirth-Infinite Frontier-Dawn Of thing though. Having villains reform is one thing, I'm all for that. Rewriting history so that they were never that bad to begin with is what bothers me. Not even in general, there are some characters where I think it is appropriate, but they've done so in mass. As a writer, I don't understand how someone looks at that opportunity for all sorts of Character Development, for past demons emerging, For Want Of A Nail situations, especially in an indefinite on going that needs all the material it can get, and just disposes of it all.

If it was just skipping to goody two shoes Poison Ivy right away, removing that bit about Catwoman being an outright super villain with minions, Riddler never building a Death Trap, toning down nearly everything about Zeus to more easily integrate Captain Marvel/SHAZAM into the Shared Universe, fine, but Ares, god of war, is redeemed before the story even begins, Cheetah is actually Good All Along, just corruptible, Atomia is heroic if over zealous, Gundra is just moody, Veronica Cale is antagonistic due to circumstances outside of her control, Doctor Cyber gets wimpified twice over, Maxima has gone from conqueror and kidnapper to school girl with a crush, Black Manta now has patience for strangers yelling in his face? No editor noticed this was getting excessive? Is the writing staff largely intimidated by depicting redemption or something? Admittedly, it's a bigger issue for the Wonder Woman book than the Superman/Batman/Aquaman comics, since reform hasn't been as persistently central to their books, but it still an odd trend seemingly affecting every part of the brand.

Edited by IndirectActiveTransport on May 1st 2024 at 8:31:41 AM

It might be overcorrecting for how the DiDio years had basically every villain be a revolting killer of some stripe.

Look, they just want Ivy and Harley to be a very marketable couple. So they aren't villains anymore.

Hell, last time Catwoman was an antagonist of a story, she was still portrayed as morally superior to Batman because stealing from the rich ends all violent crime.

Even tho the Joker was having a civil war with himself at that exact same moment.

Poison Ivy being Anti-Villain-ized has been on a slow but probably inevitable path for decades, since No Man's Land at the latest.

Increasingly over time, writers have had an issue reconciling Ivy as a ruthless, heartless manipulator, and the sympathetic traits they keep adding onto the character: that she might have sympathetic motives, that she might be actively seeking affection from others, etc.

The writing on the wall was when they decided that she ought to be a mother figure and adopt a bunch of kids, at which point I'd argue there was basically no going back - halting it at that point would involve taking away too many things attached to the character that writers had basically taken for granted by then. That was the start of the character's "neutral Anti-Villain who only wants to be left alone" era: Harley's introduction was during that era, and basically compounded what was already happening - the combination of which ended up keeping that take alive permanently.

Then she went though a decade or so of writers going back and forth as to what version of Ivy they wanted to write until DC just opted to stick with the latter. I remember reading Batman in the 2000's and noticing how it basically felt like there were two completely different Ivy's Depending on the Writer: a vicious monster with no redeeming qualities, and a ruthless but neutral crusader, and nobody could decide. Eventually, it started feeling like the writers who wanted to keep Ivy evil were almost trying to hard to push that she couldn't be good to compensate, like the story that introduced Harvest which basically turned her into a serial killer.

I overall preferred the more villain takes on Ivy, but the writing's been on the wall almost as long as I've been a Batman fan (and that's a very long time), so I came to terms with it a while ago.

Edited by KnownUnknown on May 1st 2024 at 10:26:54 AM

That's pretty well-observed. As much as I hate the attempts to "sanitize" Ivy, it is something that's been creeping in for a long time, notably much longer than the Harley push.

Ivy is actually more tolerable as an anti villainess or anti heroine than Harley, since she (usually) had better motives to start with, her Start of Darkness was forced on her while Harley was a willing accomplice of Joker, and ultimately she serves a better cause (albeit in misguided terms) than Harl.

Also, Ivy takes things seriously and usually acknowledges her actions without waving them off as humor, while Harley is so flippant about everything that it makes her regrets over her criminal past feel insincere sometimes.

But she was not always a plant person. Originally she was just a criminal with a plant gimmick and bizarrely one of her first appearances had her hating being in a jungle.

Edited by TomWithoutJerry on May 1st 2024 at 10:35:28 AM

We really need more major female villains.

And original ones at that, not replacements like Punchline.

Yeah that is part of why I don't like attempts to make Ivy and Harley faces. Having all the female villains be sympathetic, hyper-competent anti-villains or get redemption arcs while the male villains rarely ever get the same is Positive Discrimination of the worst sort.

Funny thing is Ivy was conceived as a Replacement Goldfish for Catwoman, who they felt had been acting too heroic lately.

Depends. Back in the day, Ivy barely really cared about the environment and mostly just used it as an excuse to murder, manipulate and otherwise exercise her misanthropy.

If there’s any character I would compare Dark Age Ivy to, it’d probably be Scarecrow, another character who constantly talked a big game about how cruel and awful the world was and how that inspired their actions, but who was also really just a sadist who did what they did because they enjoyed hurting people. If anything, her antics were generally worse than anything Harley’s ever done.

Much like with Harley, the change in Ivy came about when writers started rewriting her to genuinely have sympathetic intentions.

Edited by KnownUnknown on May 1st 2024 at 10:55:53 AM

Silver Age Ivy, originally written by Bob Kanigher, was an one dimensional gimmick villainess and her only plant like trait was climbing walls like ivy (?!?)

Then she was tried to be an enemy of Wonder Woman briefly, that is where the 'Ivy says she hates being in jungles' Early Installement Weirdness is from iirc.

When she returned to Batman under Gerry Conway in the Bronze Age she first gained the ability to turn people into plant mutant slaves, but her goal was still money and when usurping Bruce Wayne's fortune her ideal of having a good time was socializing instead of spending any time with plants.

Doug Moench was the first to subtly introduce elements of Ivy actually liking plants with having her open a wildlife spa as her base of operations and complaining on how the fast food industry treated plants in a team up with the rest of Batvillains.

For most of the early Post Crisis Ivy was absent from the main Batbooks. The same actually happened to many of the classic Rogues, with even the Riddler and the Penguin showing up sparingly while new villains like Magpie, KG Beast, Ventriloquist and Zsasz were introduced to varying degrees of success. During this time Ivy's only two appearances of note I remember are the Batman/Green Arrow: The Poison Tomorrow graphic novel by Denny O'Neil where she was again motivated by sheer greed and unsympathetic, despite O'Neil portraying ecoterrorism in a more 'honorable' way with Ra's al Ghul; and the Secret Origins story by Neil Gaiman, where Jason Woodrue was retconned into her origins and she was mentioned to love plants as a child, but otherwise, her motives remained selfish.

Ivy only returned to the main books in Knightfall, under Moench again, but there she was just moved by greed again.

BUT then Batman the Animated Series debuted, and that was the first work I know that actually made her a full blown ecoterrorist.

It feels like Ra's' ecoterrorism got transplanted over to Ivy for BTAS and that's what eventually led to this state where she's the plant-lover and Ra's tends to be portrayed as more "Batman but more extreme" in adaptations.

I would love to read a story where Ivy and Harley love each other... and they're still an ecoterrorist and a basket case who prefer to rob places instead of work at them.

Ivy/Harley being nicer would be a product of both genuinely trying to make changes in life - after lives of crime.

Season 3 of Batwoman had a really bad take on Ivy - at first they were being original with a pseudo-Pamela Isley stand-in, but then they decided to make Pamela the filler lesbian rep who actually had a romantic past with Renee Montoya (who I guess couldn't be shipped with Ruby Rose's Kate who was Put on a Bus.

They legit had Ivy refuse to stop being an ecoterrorist, and an interesting conflict where Montoya stayed by her side... but thwn to resolve it in time for the finale they had Montoya kidnap her onto a plane where Ivy's deeply seated feelings about ecoterrorism flatlined because of her love for Montoya.

I despise plots like that. It's like of all the relationships you could have kept on that show this one was meant to crash and burn.

Edited by FOFD on May 1st 2024 at 9:33:15 AM

God, that's rancid sounding. It's especially bad when you remember that one of Renee's biggest stories in the comics involved her being stalked and having her life ruined by a supervillain who loved her one-sidedly (Two-Face not Ivy, but still, goddamn).

I've always kind of liked The Batman's take on Ivy, where she's an ecoterrorist who legit cares about the environment... but she arguably cares more about being the hero who saves the environment. Also she's something of a coward, rarely thinks her plans through, and is a Toxic Friend Influence, which leads to her ending up a personal archenemy for Batgirl since she and Barbara used to be friends.

It's such a different take on her from her usually being the one of the few Bat-villains who has their shit together, in instead having her be an inexperienced kid who barely knows what she's doing as a villain to contrast Barbara getting an arc as an inexperienced kid who is learning the hero business as she goes.

You might like the early 2000's Harley series. That one had them going on a crime spree in Metropolis.

Edited by KnownUnknown on May 1st 2024 at 7:50:17 AM

The Batman - the show not the Reeves movies - had a lot of really weird and inventive takes on the rogues and other aspects of Bat-lore. Some of them were hits, some were misses, but all of them were definitely a refreshing change of pace.

Oh man, The Batman Ivy is legit my favorite version of the character for all the reasons you cited.

“ new villains like Magpie, KG Beast, Ventriloquist and Zsasz were introduced to varying degrees of success.”

The Ventriloquist’s hopeless. Scarface, though, he’s a gig greakout star.

…what?

I also liked The Batman’s version of Clayface, even if he was more or less just Two-Face with shapeshifting powers.

Though he did get the opportunity to turn his life around and have it stick, something that keeps getting denied Two-Face.

The show had some misses, like its versions of Bane and Freeze, but overall it was really good. Its original villains were good too: I liked the concept of the Everywhere Man, and its version of Clock King (though it never referred to him as Clock King, I think that’s just a convenient link fans gave him).

Edited by KnownUnknown on May 2nd 2024 at 9:16:30 AM

Is scarface a demonic dummy or a split personality of the ventriloquist? Or does it depend on the writer?