Hybrid Murder Mystery: Review of Poison Ivy - Cycles of Life and Death

 

Review:

The exotic and real-world Sheep-Eater plant in Chile takes a longtime to bloom, flowering only once every decade or so. It is both beautiful, with its tall yellow flowers, and deadly, with its reputation of capturing and killing sheep and birds.

Poison Ivy, the beautiful and deadly Batman villain-turned-antihero, likewise took a long time to bloom. First appearing in all her evil beauty in Batman #181 (1966), she became a regular in Harley Quinn's orbit and in titles like Gotham City Sirens. But her first solo series had to wait until 2016, in the six-issue limited series collected here.

As Doctor Pam Isley, she works at the Gotham Botanical Gardens, researching hybrid blending of human and plant DNA. As Poison Ivy, she applies the research to grow two plant-human hybrid children of her own. But someone at the Botanical Gardens has their own agenda for how to apply her research.

Amy Chu cultivates a slow-moving murder mystery, with each new plot bud slowly opening up. The fastest growing elements in the tale are her two children, her 'sporelings' Rose and Hazel, who age through years of human development in a matter of weeks. The story is a beautiful, quiet tale with bursts of violence.

Clay Mann does the majority of the pencils, handling four of the six chapters, with Seth Mann doing the same on inks. They give us verdant visuals bursting with life. Ivy is stunning, tall and sexy, uninhibited and comfortable in her own skin even as she struggles with her humanity and how to relate to others.

The softness and sexiness of the two Manns' art gives way to an edgier final chapter by a team of five artists. The art of this final confrontation is filled with thorny and spiky hard edges, befitting the clash of wills and powers portrayed.

Ivy is hardly alone in this lush tale. We get a couple Harley Quinn cameos and a more sustained role for Catwoman. And the final battle brings Swamp Thing into the arrangement. 

It all adds up to a portrait of our hero as one who is intelligent, passionate about nature, but who also feels so lonely in her unique blend of human and plant. Her first solo adventure is well worth the wait and the read.

Description:

POISON IVY BLOSSOMS INTO HER FIRST SOLO ADVENTURE!

There’s animal. There’s vegetable. And there’s somewhere in between.

That’s where Dr. Pamela Isley, a.k.a. Poison Ivy, finds herself. Instead of battling the Dark Knight, she is now a researcher at the Gotham Botanical Gardens, studying the possibility of creating plant-human hybrids.

But when her fellow scientists start turning up dead, she’s both the natural leading suspect…and the only person (or plant) who can crack the case.

To solve the mystery, Poison Ivy must team up—or throw down—with her oldest friends and closest frenemies, from Harley Quinn to Catwoman to the Swamp Thing. Can she keep things under control, or will she be responsible for a deadly new harvest?

Find out in POISON IVY: CYCLE OF LIFE AND DEATH. Sprouting from the brains of the up-and-coming creative team of writer Amy Chu and artist Clay Mann, it’s a mean, green murder mystery starring one of Batman’s greatest rogues!

Collects: POISON IVY: CYCLE OF LIFE AND DEATH #1-6

Authors:  Amy Chu
Artists:  Clay Mann, Seth Mann
Published By:  DC Comics
Published When:  Sept. 13, 2016
Parental Rating: Teen
ISBN:  978-1401264512
Pages:  144 pages

Emotionally Undead - a Review of Blackest Night

 

Review:

The core story from the 2009 DC Comics mega-crossover event Blackest Night is collected into this handsome hardcover book. With loads of special features - variant cover gallery, director's commentary, loads of sketches, even a silver black-ring logo hiding under the dust jacket - it is an impressive collection.

If only the story inside lived up to the packaging.

Written by highly regarded author Geoff Johns and pencilled by Ivan Reis, Blackest Night follows a series of seismic storylines in the Green Lantern books of the day. It draws together the seven Corps with their rings of different colours and fueled by different emotions and even mines historical Green Lantern lore as far back as Alan Moore's writing of a 1986 Green Lantern Corps tale.

Nekron, the personification of death itself, has found a way to use Black Hand in a scheme to extinguish the light of life and all emotion from the universe. But first he must corrupt and capture or kill the Guardians. 

While that storyline unfolds mostly in the background, our attention is focused on the experiences of several heroes, many of whom find key deceased heroes or villains resurrected by the power of a black ring. Their emotional connection to these lost loved ones - from Ralph and Sue Dibney to Aquaman, from the JSA and Freedom Fighters to even Batman - only serves to make these reanimated corpses even more powerful.

When even the combined might of all seven corps fails to stop Nekron, they discover they can magically divide and delegate their rings for a limited time, a deus ex machina that gives the reader the opportunity to see how Lex Luthor, Mera or even Scarecrow would wield a power ring attuned to their own strongest emotion.

In the end, Johns rewrites some foundational Green Lantern and DC Comics mythology - such as the Guardians working to hide the fact that life began on Earth, not Oa - and undoes recent DC history of killing off characters by resurrecting some key ones. Although no attempt is made to explain why some but not others are so treated - Maxwell Lord rises to life again, not merely as a Black Ring zombie but fully alive again, although Ted Kord / Blue Beetle whom he killed, is not. (Look for more adventures of the alive-again Maxwell Lord in the follow-up Brightest Day / Justice League Generation Lost story)

While Johns gives us a tale worthy of the classic mega-crossovers, with globe-shaking events and universe-level threats, loads of cameos and changes to the larger comics landscape, it all ultimately falls flat. Combining all the colours of light is supposed to give white light, but here the overall impression is just muddy brown. Reader emotional connections to the characters and situations fail to materialize and it all just blurs together.

Ivan Reis and his rotation of inkers do well at rendering the walking dead and flying dead, portraying them as desiccated and half-decomposed undead monsters, loads of sharp teeth, missing bits of flesh, tentacles and tongues. It is not pretty to look at, but it does the job of evoking horror at the state of the combatants.

They also give us loads of full-page and two-page spreads, packing in as many characters and shafts of coloured light as possible. Just about every time the seven corps work as one, it gets a double-page spread.

In all, it is a reasonable addition to the historical crossover events, although the art is grotesque and unpleasant and the story fails, ironically, to find its emotional core in the midst of all those emotion-powered Lantern Corps.

Description:

Comics' hottest writer Geoff Johns (GREEN LANTERN: SINESTRO CORPS WAR, THE FLASH, ACTION COMICS, JSA) and superstar artist Ivan Reis raise the dead in this hardcover collection of the most anticipated comics event of the year!

Throughout the decades, death has plagued the DC Universe and taken the lives of heroes and villains alike. But to what end? As the War between the different colored Lantern Corps rages on, the prophecy of the Blackest Night descends and it's up to Hal Jordan and the Green Lantern Corps to lead DC's greatest champions in a battle to save the Universe from an army of undead Black Lanterns made up of fallen Green Lanterns and DC's deceased heroes and villains.

This collection of the best-selling epic is the culmination of the events that Geoff Johns has been leading to since he relaunched the Green Lantern franchise in 2006!

Collects: BLACKEST NIGHT #0-8

Authors:  Geoff Johns
Artists:  Ivan Reis
Published By:  DC Comics
Published When:  July 13, 2010
Parental Rating: Teen
ISBN:  978-1401226930
Pages:  264 pages

Jurgens at the Wheel: a review of Booster Gold: the Complete 2007 Series Book 2

 

Review:

With 17 issues in one book, collecting #15-31 of the 2007 Booster Gold ongoing series plus Booster's appearance in The Brave and the Bold #23, this is a hefty TPB, weighing in at 750 grams. Maybe for that reason, DC Comics omitted any of the special features such collections usually include. No variant cover gallery, no draft storyboards and no interviews.

That omission is the only real complaint about this otherwise fine volume. The stories within are loads of fun, showing that the Booster Gold series of the era was one of DC's strongest titles in terms of sheer exuberance, cleverness and month to month enjoyability.

Dan Jurgens created Booster Gold in the post-Crisis mid to late 1980s. He wrote and pencilled all of the original run's issues. Here, twenty years later, he had started as penciller on the new series and character reboot. He takes over the writing duties with issue #15.

The reboot saw Booster Gold, fugitive from the future turned self-promoting, brand-savvy hero, has morphed in the hands of Geoff Johns and others, into a Time Master in training. So it is fascinating to see Jurgens reassume full creative control of Booster Gold.

Right off the bat, he tweaks and redirects a somewhat clunky two-parter by another writer into a multi-part tumble through time over an Egyptian knife (Reality Lost) with connection to Blue Beetle's scarab. This arc includes loads of nods to DC history and leads to a team-up with... himself? Isn't that a temporal paradox and Time Master no-no?

Lest we think that Jurgens will be a clumsy author with things relating to time travel, his stories in this volume how his keen awareness of such paradoxes and traps, and a staunch refusal to be bound by them. Multiple times, Jurgens bends the supposed rules about time travel tales. But, as he does so well, he has Booster Gold wrestling with these very rules and paradoxes himself. Can the past be changed? Where are the seams and folds in the time stream that can become entry points for bad actors? What does it mean to be a hero when faced with the certain death of seven million people? These and more questions ripple throughout these stories.

Separating each of the major story arcs (Reality Lost, mentioned above, followed by Day of Death, a delightful dip into early Wolfman-Perez New Teen Titans lore, then finally The Tomorrow Memory based around Cyborg Superman's destruction of Coast City) are delightful little Epilogue and one-off tales. Things like a sweet Christmas gift for Dick Grayson, at the time the new Batman struggling with the weight of the famed cowl. Or attempts to mend a broken relationship with his own sister and the realization of how hard and lonely his chosen life is.

With strong storytelling, amazing visuals straight from Jurgens' own full-page-splash wheelhouse, delightful connections and nods to past DC history and events, this is a collection of strong stories, must-reads for fans of the character of course, but also intriguing and emotional dips into near-alternative universes and beloved characters. They are not all home runs, but if the weakest is a Keith Giffen nod to 1970s sitcoms set in the 1950s (think Happy Days or Laverne and Shirley) then this is well worth the effort to pick up.

Description:

Booster Gold, as told by his co-creator Dan Jurgens! Re-live Booster’s struggle through major DC Universe events like Blackest Night and see some of his greatest team-ups as he struggles to right the wrongs of the timeline that he himself keeps messing up!

Though Booster yearns for the simple life, destiny has thrust the responsibility of time itself in his hands. As the time stream goes awry and the past unravels, he must put history back in its place before existence vanishes entirely!

Collects: Booster Gold #15-31 and The Brave and the Bold #23

Authors:  Dan Jurgens, Keith Giffen
Artists:  Dan Jurgens, Norm Rapmund
Published By:  DC Comics
Published When:  April 8, 2025
Parental Rating: Teen
ISBN:  978-1799501039
Pages:  440 pages

Of People and Puppies: a review of Booster Gold volume 5 The Tomorrow Memory

 

Review:

By this point in Booster history, Dan Jurgens, creator of Booster Gold, has hit his full creative stride and brought the character to his highest pinnacle of fame and visibility.

This TPB collects issues #26-31 of the ongoing Booster Gold (2007) series, surpassing the length of his original late-80s series which was cancelled after issue #25. Then by the end of the issues collected here, Booster would debut as team leader in the new Justice League: Generation Lost series, with a third (Time Masters: Vanishing Point) set to begin just a couple months later. That made three concurrent Booster Gold series - truly his glory days!

This flagship series continues to give us ever more compelling stories. The first two collected chapters tie into the DC Universe crossover event Blackest Night. In Booster's case he must face off against the reanimated and black ring-powered Ted Kord, aka the Blue Beetle. But his former best bud is not here for a party and a bwa-ha-ha good time, he is here to kill and maim. It leads to an emotional head-trip for our hero as he must struggle against confusion and revulsion at seeing his long-lost friend in this walking-dead state.

The visuals and concepts are occasionally gruesome. But Jurgens uses a clever framing device to great effect, with Booster Gold's self-flagellation at failing to properly eulogize Ted at Blue Beetle's funeral.

The final four chapters are the title tale The Tomorrow Memory. Booster's sister Michelle is back! She had disappeared, you may recall, to a where and when unknown upon discovering at Vanishing Point that she should have been dead already. It turns out that she jumped into the past and has wound up in Coast City just before it is destroyed by Cyborg Superman and Mongul. In the meantime, she has found a boyfriend. But she remembers enough of her history lessons to realize what is coming. If only she could convince others of the danger!

Booster is overjoyed, of course, to find her again; but he also knows what is about to happen to the seven million people and is faced with the impossibly weighty questions of what it means to be a hero versus the mission to protect the time stream.

In the end (spoiler alert) the boyfriend dies, Michelle is saved from certain death again, and a mystery man with a close tie to Rip and Booster helps out at the last minute.

The Epilogue that closes this book is a beautiful and moving cap to a fine collection. All of the frustrations and confusions and paradoxes have built up and Booster craves the emotional release of thumping some bad guys. But when an innocent bystander is hurt by his actions, he withdraws to watch - without intervening - an earth-shaping disaster. Rip Hunter comes along to help his partner, offering a small but positive change they can make. Then he watches with pride as Booster goes on to make a much bigger positive change in his broken relationship with his sister. It is a beautiful story with action, character development and touches of family, love, loneliness and duty.

The art throughout the collection is covered by some of Jurgens' trademarks. With classic heroic poses and full-page splashes, lots of good old-fashioned superhero fun but with remarkable emotional range.

Description:

After fighting Black Lantern and former Blue Beetle Ted Kord, Booster Gold finds himself lost in time, struggling to save his sister Goldstar from imminent death. However, when Booster Gold rescues his sister from the timestream - he soon realizes that the sister he saved is not the same girl he remembers.

Collects: Booster Gold #26-31

Authors:  Dan Jurgens
Artists:  Dan Jurgens, Norm Rapmund
Published By:  DC Comics
Published When:  Dec 7, 2010
Parental Rating: Teen
ISBN:  978-1401229184
Pages:  160 pages