Warning: contains spoilers for Poison Ivy #10!Without her realizing, Poison Ivy's new powers have radically changed DC's Earth. Though Ivy normally has serious control over the natural world, her weakened state means she lost some of that control for a time, and now she's seeing the consequences in the world around her.
Poison Ivy realizes the full extent of those consequences in Poison Ivy #10 by G. Willow Wilson, Marcio Takara, Arif Prianto, and Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou. The issue follows Ivy and her roommate Janet as they attend (or investigate, according to Ivy) a wellness retreat. Ivy understands the full scope of her mistakes only after the attendees seem to experience a group hallucination.
In the aftermath of a mass hallucinogenic experience, strange purple pustules start sprouting from the retreat attendees' skin. Janet tells Ivy they look like what once grew from her own skin after her first meeting with the anti-hero. And so Ivy knows: the psychedelic lamia spores that she had been incubating inside her body have escaped, and have now entered Earth's ecosystem, growing wild.
Poison Ivy's Hallucinogens Are Now a Natural Part of DC's World
Poison Ivy's control over the natural world through her connection to the supernatural Green was severely weakened after the events of the Batman story "Fear State" and her time as Queen Ivy. But even that setback didn't keep Ivy down for long; at the beginning of her solo series, Pamela Isley set out on a massive road trip with one goal: destroy humanity by poisoning them with new mushrooms and spores she was cultivating using her own body. Though Ivy eventually decided that she was, in fact, on the side of humanity - and though her old powers are slowly strengthening within her - Ivy's connection to the lamia remains strong, and apparently they're strong enough to exist without her, too.
Poison Ivy Is Attacking Humanity... By Accident
Now that both Poison Ivy and her fans know that the lamia are growing wild ("Nothing you cook up in a lab stays in a lab."), it's likely that DC's world has changed forever. Already these wild, hallucinogenic spores borne from Ivy's own body are wreaking havoc in her immediate vicinity; what happens when they start to crop up around the country and even the world? Before, Ivy's particular brand of environmental chaos was usually contained to Gotham, or at least localized to wherever she herself was based. Now, Ivy has introduced a new plant species that can harm humans, coming closer to her prior extinction agenda, right as she's decided against it.
Now, almost any DC location could deal with a "Poison Ivy outbreak," from Central City to Coast City. Poison Ivy isn't just Gotham's problem anymore, and that opens up a whole new realm of story possibilities. Surely the ongoing Poison Ivy series will continue to explore those possibilities, but hopefully readers will see the consequences of this development in other corners of the DC Universe as well. Poison Ivy has been a breakout character this year, so it's only fitting that her influence will now be felt across the planet.
Check out Poison Ivy #10, available now from DC Comics!