Poison Ivy
First Appearance: Batman ( Vol 1) # 181 ( June 1966)
POISON Ivy aka Pamela Lillian Isley started off as a Batman villain but evolved into a notorious ecoterrorist. She will do anything to protect the environment and her precious plants, and this has given her something of an anti- heroic slant, having performed humane and heroic deeds that even overshadow other heroes’ world- saving feats.
Batman himself once said: “... as much as she would hate to admit it, Ivy is still more human than plant”.
Her Silver Age days saw her moulded after pinup queen Betty Page, and portrayed as a temptress in a plant bikini. Obviously, it’s not easy to take a sexy walking plant seriously, and she was so badly stereotyped that even Uma Thurman portraying her in the terrible
Batman And Robin moviei did nothing to boost her popularity.
There WAS one notable attempt at revitalising Ivy, though, and it came thanks to none other than Neil Gaiman, who revised her origins ( see Secret Origins # 36) by uprooting her and placing her alongside notable plantbased characters like Swamp Thing and Dr J Jason Woodrue, aka The Floronic Man. The eerie presence of the latter as the cause of Ivy’s transformation certainly lends more credibility to her origin.
One notable trait in Ivy’s character is her raison d’etre. While most villains aim to conquer the world or become extremely rich, all Ivy wants is to accumulate enough funds to find a location to settle down with her plants. She succeeded in doing so on a desert island in the Caribbean once, but that dream was shattered when a US corporation used it as a weapons testing ground. During the Batman crossover event No
Man’s Land, she got a second chance to accomplish her dream through “purifying” an earthquake- ravaged Gotham City. This stands as the moment when her humane and heroic nature took centre stage – besides transforming Gotham’s Robinson Park into a tropical paradise, Ivy also took 16 orphans under her care, and provided fresh produce to the quake victims, an instrumental role that convinced Batman to let her go free afterft th the event.
One other event further confirmed her anti- hero status – when she and Harley Quinn were each given $ 30mil by Catwoman ( who plundered Hush’s slush fund) to restart their lives outside Gotham, Ivy donated all the money to reforestation causes in Madagascar and Costa Rica, while Harley went on a massive shopping spree!