Poison Ivy (character)

• 1. Introduction

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  Poison Ivy exists because of a television show, and the artist who sketched her said so plainly. Carmine Infantino recalled: "The only reason she came about was because of Catwoman on the Batman show. They wanted more female villains." Infantino drew the first design. Writer Robert Kanigher then shaped her personality in the script for Batman #181, published in June 1966. Infantino also remembered what the series meant to the Batman comics. In his words, "we were selling a million copies a month." When the show died, he said, so did the comic books. The comics survived that crash, and so did she. Today Poison Ivy counts among the most enduring enemies in Batman's rogues gallery. She is a botanist who commands plants, a self-appointed defender of nature, and a woman who has been Batman's adversary, his ally and something harder to name. How did a character born from a demand for more female villains earn her own comic series? What does she want from humanity, why does her origin keep changing, and why do the people around her, from Batman to Harley Quinn, keep coming back to her?

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• 2. Three Origins

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  In her earliest incarnation, she was Dr. Lillian Rose, a promising botanist. A man named Marc LeGrand persuaded her to help him steal an Egyptian artifact that held ancient herbs. Afraid she would name him as an accomplice, LeGrand tried to poison her with those same herbs, which were deadly and untraceable. She survived. The attempt left her immune to every natural toxin and disease.

  Crisis on Infinite Earths, a DC maxi-series, rebooted the publisher's history, and her past was rewritten in Secret Origins #36 in 1988. Writer Neil Gaiman named her Dr. Pamela Isley, a Gotham City botanist raised in wealth by emotionally distant parents. At university she studied advanced botanical biochemistry with Alec Holland, under Dr. Jason Woodrue. Shy and easily seduced by her professor, she became his experimental subject. Woodrue injected her with poisons and toxins. She nearly died twice, and the ordeal drove her insane. Woodrue then fled the authorities and left her in a hospital for six months. Betrayed, she swung between sweetness and rage. When her boyfriend crashed his car after a mysterious and massive fungal overgrowth, Isley dropped out, left Seattle and eventually settled in Gotham. In Gaiman's telling, she declares herself nature's daughter and the world's rightful ruler.

  The New 52 reboot supplied a third version in Detective Comics #23.1, part of the Villains Month event in September 2013. This Pamela Isley was born with a skin condition that kept her indoors, so she spent her few outdoor hours in the family garden. Her abusive father murdered her mother and buried her there. At college, Pamela sold pheromone pills to other students to study their effects. Police caught her, so she used a far stronger batch to control the dean's mind. He dropped the charges and let her graduate with honors. On a prison visit to her father, she kissed him, and the poison from her lips killed him. An internship in the Bio-Chemistry Division of Wayne Enterprises followed. Bruce Wayne fired her after discovering that she was using company resources to brainwash people with plant pheromones. While guards escorted her out, she attacked them and was exposed to lethal doses of her own chemicals, in an accident much like the one that created Mr. Freeze. The mutation gave her green skin and mastery over plant life.

  Later comics revealed that no laboratory accident was the true source of her gifts, and that the real source has a name.

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• 3. The Green

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  Isley was first assumed to be the product of human experiments. Later stories credit the Green, an interplanetary force, with her gifts. It grants her supernatural control over plant life, enhanced strength and stamina, poison transferred by touch, and pheromones that control minds. At full potential those pheromones can control every person on Earth, including other superpowered beings. Her spores laced with kryptonite can even reach Superman.

  Her command of plants works at the molecular level, so she can mutate them as well as direct them. In the third volume of Batman, she uproots giant roots at a moment's notice and sends them to entangle her enemies. Inside Arkham Asylum, she used roots to support a tunnel that she and an inmate named Magpie dug to escape. She also grew glowing fungi to entertain Magpie. On one occasion she brought a whole skyscraper down with giant vines.

  Some versions make her more plant than human, breathing carbon dioxide and undergoing photosynthesis. Her toxins are the most potent floral poisons in Gotham City, ranging from truth serums to love potions. She often secretes them from her lips and delivers them with a kiss. Ironically, her immunity to poisons left her sterile and unable to give birth.

  Swamp Thing identifies her as a being with an elemental mystical component and calls her the "May Queen." Once she manifested in a vase of roses in Zatanna's dressing room to speak with the magician from a great distance. In another storyline she took a serum from Hush and apparently died. Her grave was soon covered with ivy. After that rebirth, she can grow giant animated plants from seedlings in seconds, hear through plants, and channel her consciousness into plant material from far away. The live vines she carries on her body are limited in number.

  Her mind is as formidable as her powers. Isley is an expert in botany, toxicology and genetics, and she may be the world's foremost botanist. She first used that knowledge for perfumes, makeup and medicine. Her biochemistry lets her create mutant plants and revive species long thought extinct. Gymnastics and enhanced health make her fit enough to challenge Batman in hand-to-hand combat. Pamela Isley has always been beautiful, yet she never used her looks or talents for personal gain until she became Poison Ivy.

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• 4. Mother Nature's Hand

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  Writer J. T. Krul, who helped define her personality, described a woman walking a line between guardian of Mother Nature and psychotic eco-terrorist. "She sees herself as the hand of Mother Nature," he said. He added that if Mother Nature were "God," then Ivy would be her "Jesus." In his view, her maiming and mutilating are extreme, yet small beside the cruelties humanity has inflicted on the natural world. Ivy herself claims the title "ecoterrorist of global importance."

  Her mission began with a private goal. She said she turned to crime only to raise enough money for a place where she could be alone with her plants. Years later she escaped Arkham and settled on a desert island in the Caribbean. There she turned barren wasteland into a second Eden, and for the first time in her life she was happy. An American-owned corporation then tested its weapons systems on the island, believing it abandoned, and firebombed it. Ivy returned to Gotham to punish those responsible. After she let Batman apprehend her, she decided she could never leave Gotham until the world was safe for plants. She dedicated herself to "purifying" the city.

  Money reveals her priorities. After Hush tried to hurt Batman through his loved ones, Selina Kyle paid Holly Robinson, Harley Quinn and Ivy more than $30 million each, hoping they would start fresh elsewhere. Harley went on a shopping spree. Ivy gave hers to organizations in Madagascar and Costa Rica dedicated to reforestation. In the Gotham Girls episode "Pave Paradise," she goes out of her way to make Gotham's mayor keep his election promise not to bulldoze a park. In the "Source Code" arc of Batgirl and the Birds of Prey, she moves against Terracare, whose fertilizers contain a secret ingredient destructive to bee populations. Batgirl later arranges for Ivy to become the chemist in charge of those fertilizers.

  Her conviction has a darker side. In the "One Year Later" era, Batman returned from a year away to find that she had been feeding people to a giant plant that digested them slowly and painfully. Her victims included "tiresome lovers," "incompetent henchmen" and those who "returned her smile." She called the murders a "guilty pleasure." Their souls merged with the plant and created a botanical monster named Harvest, which sought revenge on her.

  Guilt eventually caught up with her. In the Batman arc "Everyone Loves Ivy," she was consumed by remorse over men she believed she had killed in "The War of Jokes and Riddles." She used her powers to take control of everyone on Earth except Batman and Catwoman. With Harley Quinn's help, the two persuaded her to release the world. Ivy then entered a rehabilitation facility called the Sanctuary.

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• 5. Ivy As Guardian

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  When an earthquake wrecked Gotham City and it was declared No Man's Land, Poison Ivy behaved unlike most of Batman's enemies. Rather than fight over territory, she claimed Robinson Park and turned it into a tropical paradise. Sixteen children orphaned by the quake came to live with her. She sympathized because she had suffered a traumatic childhood herself, and she cared for them like sons and daughters.

  That winter, Clayface, whose name is Basil Karlo, visited with a bargain. Ivy would grow fruits and vegetables, the orphans would harvest them, and he would sell the produce to the highest bidder. She refused and tried to kill him with a kiss. Clayface overpowered her and locked her and the orphans for six months in a chamber beneath the park's lake. He fed her salt and kept her from the sun to weaken her. Batman discovered them, and the two agreed to work together. He fought Clayface and told Robin to blow up the lake bed. The rushing water broke apart the mud and freed Ivy. She ensnared Karlo in a tree's branches, kissed him fatally, and sank him into the ground as fertilizer. Batman had meant to take the orphans away. He concluded instead that they were better off with her, and they stayed until the city was restored. As part of a bargain for her freedom, he also arranged for Ivy to supply fresh produce to starving survivors.

  When Gotham reopened, the city council wanted her out of the park. Members were uncomfortable with a "psychotic eco-terrorist controlling the equivalent of 30-odd square blocks." They also wrongly believed the orphans were hostages. The police threatened to spray the park with R.C. Sixty, a herbicide that would have killed every plant, Ivy included, and probably harmed the children. Ivy chose martyrdom. Then Rose, one of the orphans, was accidentally poisoned by Ivy, and the hardened eco-terrorist surrendered to save the girl's life. Batman observed that, as much as she would hate to admit it, Ivy was still more human than plant.

  In January 2016, DC Comics launched her first solo series, Poison Ivy: Cycle of Life and Death. Writing as Dr. Pamela Isley, she tries to go straight by joining the plant sciences department at the Gotham Botanical Gardens. Her friend and mentor Luisa Cruz is poisoned. Ivy investigates while completing a genetic engineering project that Cruz began. It produces two plant-human hybrid children, Rose and Hazel. With Selina Kyle and a researcher named Darshan, Ivy learns that the Gardens are using her research to create a third child, Thorn. She destroys the laboratory and rescues the child.

  The three girls grow to adult size at an exponential rate and become young women within 35 weeks. After they sneak out to see Gotham at night and cause an incident that brings in the police, Ivy locks them away. Then Doctor Eric Grimley, chair of the Gardens' research department, appears. He had used her research to treat his own cancer, and he had murdered Luisa for becoming suspicious. With the cancer returning, he planned to harvest spores from the girls. Grimley turned into a giant plant-like monster. Ivy, the girls, Darshan and Swamp Thing, who wanted to stop an attempt to break the cycle of life and death, defeated him. Thorn finished the fight with a machete. Darshan later helped the girls leave Gotham, and they set off for unknown places, determined to live out their lives however short they might be.

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• 6. Batman And Ivy

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  Her very first appearance already tied her to Batman. In it, Ivy is attracted to him, tries to persuade him to join her side, and brews love potions that ensnare him. At first the infatuation was one-sided. Later stories made the attraction more mutual, although Batman stayed reluctant.

  In the story Pavane, Pamela is interviewed by Inspector Stuart as a Suicide Squad candidate and explains how she became Poison Ivy. When she heard about Batman, she fell in love with the man she took to be the perfect man, and she built a love shrine to him. She moved to Gotham, made a costume, took her new name and began committing crimes to get his attention. Her hope was to become the number one crime couple. It failed, and she ended up in Arkham Asylum.

  In Batman: Hothouse, from 1992, Ivy kisses him and, completely deranged, imagines herself "Titania, Queen of the May" with Batman as her Oberon. As he struggles with hallucinations, she pins him down and prepares to unmask him. With his last burst of strength, he kicks on the greenhouse sprinklers and washes away her pheromones. He chases her onto the catwalks and barely saves her from a fatal fall. Back in Arkham, her twisted love is stronger than ever.

  In the 1997 story Batman: Poison Ivy, a man named Christopher DeJardin tries to kill her, and Batman takes the bullet. He is wearing body armor and knocks the gunman out. Ivy considers the rescue proof of love. Batman answers that she does not know the meaning of the word.

  In the story Passion's Fruit, a lonely Ivy misses Batman at Arkham. She unleashes plant creations that multiply on contact with water, until Batman finally visits. In exchange for the visit and a kiss, she turns her creations into harmless strawberry plants. An annual of Batman: Shadow of the Bat shows the attraction running both ways. Speaking with Alfred Pennyworth, Batman admits that he finds Ivy attractive, and more appealing than Catwoman.

  In Detective Comics volume two, issue 14, from January 2013, she kisses him in order to control him. "You're the only one for me Batman, you know that right? Nobody else even comes close. Not anybody." Instead of reaching for an antidote, Batman rigs his visor to show visual stimuli that erase his short-term memory, and with it any commands she gives. In Batman: The Long Halloween, Bruce and Ivy have a sexually implied relationship over the three months he spends under her mind control, on the orders of mob boss Carmine Falcone. The 2021 Fear State storyline, in Batman #113, shows her kissing him in his mind alongside Catwoman and Talia al Ghul. In the thirteenth issue of her solo series, Bruce refers to their past relationship when Pamela returns to Gotham.

  The tenderest story is Batman/Poison Ivy: Cast Shadows, from 2004. Flowers poison Batman, and he tells Alfred he must kiss Ivy for the cure. If he fails, Alfred must kill him. He warns Ivy he will have to knock her out first. He raises a fist, hesitates, and then they embrace and kiss. When Gotham Tower collapses, Ivy assumes he is dead and tries to kill herself, and he saves her. They watch her plant creations glow, and Batman compliments her talent. Back in Arkham, Ivy complains that her cell has no light, and Batman says he can do nothing. The next morning she is moved to a sunlit cell filled with flowers, a gift from an "anonymous benefactor." A touched Ivy smiles and thanks Batman.

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• 7. Harley And The Sirens

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  After the earthquake, Ivy found Harley Quinn among the debris, nearly murdered by the Joker, and nursed her back to health. The two have been best friends and partners-in-crime ever since. Unlike most villain team-ups, theirs rests on genuine friendship and mutual respect. Ivy sincerely wants to save Harley from her unhealthy, abusive relationship with the Joker. For that reason she despises him, and the two trade vicious banter at every opportunity.

  After escaping a new Black Mask's control, Ivy allied with Catwoman and Harley, which led into the series Gotham City Sirens. She decided Catwoman needed "positive female reinforcement." She and Harley set one condition for the team: Catwoman must reveal Batman's secret identity. That demand cost them dearly. Harley later broke into Arkham to kill the Joker but freed him instead, and together they took over the facility. Ivy tried to convince Harley that the Joker was evil. Harley knocked her unconscious. Catwoman told Ivy they were no longer friends, because Ivy had drugged her to learn Batman's identity. Ivy escaped Arkham, ambushed Harley in her cell, and bound and gagged her. She struggled with whether to execute her former friend for betrayal, then let her go. In the final storyline of the Sirens series, Harley suggested that Ivy might be in love with her. Ivy acknowledged that she might, but her feelings were never spelled out before the New 52 reboot ended the series.

  In June 2015, Harley Quinn series writers Jimmy Palmiotti and Amanda Conner stated that Ivy was romantically involved with Harley, "without the jealousy of monogamy." In Harley Quinn volume one, issue 8, Harley took Ivy to a nudist colony and tried to persuade her to move in. Ivy admitted she loved Harley more than any other person on Earth. She was more dedicated to saving the environment, though, and Harley accepted this sadly. They parted with promises to meet again. In that series, set in Harley's new home on Coney Island, Ivy turns disputed real estate into protected swampland. She also helps defeat the Penguin's giant killer penguins by growing a giant daisy, in what their friend Eggy calls "the worst Kaiju fight ever." Tee Franklin, one of the writers of the Harley Quinn comics, has said she wrote Ivy as autistic but "figured DC would be against" mentioning it. In Injustice 2 #70, set in an alternate universe, Ivy says she was married to Harley.

  In Heroes in Crisis, Ivy goes to the Sanctuary and confesses that she should not be there, since the place is for heroes and she is a terrorist. Harley had urged her to go and followed her. When Wally West loses control of the Speed Force, Ivy and others die. Wally revives her from the Green by using the Speed Force on a rose that was part of her and had been given to Harley. The follow-up Harley Quinn and Poison Ivy limited series finds her struggling to regenerate. With Harley's help she recovers, but she accidentally creates an identical plant duplicate of herself. Neither the double nor Harley knows the truth, and the pair go on the run, leaving the real Ivy feeling abandoned and betrayed. By the time they learn of the mistake, she is murderously insane toward Harley. The double sacrifices herself to save Harley and to steady Ivy's mind.

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• 8. Page And Screen

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  The 2021 graphic novel Poison Ivy: Thorns led to an ongoing Poison Ivy series, first published in 2022. G. Willow Wilson writes it, and the collected volumes began in May 2023 with The Virtuous Cycle, drawn by Marcio Takara. Volume two, Unethical Consumption, was drawn by Atagun Ilhan. Volume six, A Death in Marshview, collects issues 31-36 and is dated the 13th of January 2026. Ivy also headlined the 2018 miniseries Harley & Ivy Meet Betty & Veronica, by Marc Andreyko and Paul Dini with art by Laura Braga.

  Critics have ranked her highly. IGN placed her at number 64 on its list of the Top 100 Comic Book Villains of All Time. Comics Buyer's Guide ranked her 21st in its "100 Sexiest Women in Comics." Alternate universes have reimagined her many times. In Absolute Batman, she is a scientist who experimented with all six kingdoms of life and became a hybrid of them after the Joker trapped her in her lab. In Harley Quinn: Breaking Glass, she is Ivy Du-Barry, a Gotham High student in the film club.

  On television, Diane Pershing voiced her in Batman: The Animated Series, which debuted in 1992. That version had no direct control over plants. She bred special plants, used her chemistry knowledge, and carried a wrist-mounted crossbow. In The New Batman Adventures, she was redesigned with light green skin and a dark green outfit. When asked about her fate, series creator Paul Dini said she moved to South America and settled in the Amazon rainforest, allowing her body to merge with the environment. Lake Bell voices a sarcastic, cynical, introverted Ivy in the animated series Harley Quinn, where she becomes Harley's best friend and later her girlfriend. In The Batman, from 2004, Piera Coppola voices a teenage environmental activist who gained her abilities from a plant-based mutagen called chlorogene.

  Uma Thurman played her in the 1997 film Batman & Robin as a Wayne Enterprises botanist. Her colleague Jason Woodrue steals her work to create Bane and tries to kill her with toxins, but instead turns her into Poison Ivy. In the Fox series Gotham, Clare Foley, Maggie Geha and Peyton List played Ivy Pepper, a street kid who taught herself to make mind-altering chemicals from plants and herbs. Her father Mario was framed for the deaths of Thomas and Martha Wayne. Bridget Regan played Pamela Isley in Batwoman, as a scientist and ex-lover of Renee Montoya.

  In the video game Batman: Arkham Knight, voiced primarily by Tasia Valenza as in the rest of the Arkham series, Ivy reluctantly allies with Batman against Scarecrow, whose fear toxin is killing her plants. She sacrifices herself to save Gotham from the toxin. She is also a cosmetic outfit in Fortnite. Director Cathy Yan once wanted to make a Birds of Prey sequel exploring the relationship between Harley Quinn and Poison Ivy, with Ivy meant to appear in Gotham City Sirens, until the film was put on hold.

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