Multiverse of Color sat down with Poison Ivy writer, G. Willow Wilson, on top of the DC booth at San Diego Comic-Con 2024 on Friday, July 26.
Wilson’s ongoing Poison Ivy series with Marcio Takara, has taken on a life of its own growing past its initial story and limited run to a full-blown ongoing with multiple variant covers, fantastic guest artists, and fully realized Pamela Isley arc.
“I’m really interested in the way that she’s changed over the decades.”
Multiverse of Color: Poison Ivy is on an all-star run. It started as a 12 issue limited story. Did you anticipate this? The fan reception, the glowing critiques? Did you expect any of this?
G. Willow Wilson: I did not expect it at all. Honestly, you know, it didn’t even start out as a 12-issue maxi series, it started out as an eight-page short story in a villains anthology [Gotham City Villains Anniversary Giant (2021)] with the Danny DeVito-written Penguin mini-issue. It was really just supposed to be a short little thing for an anthology. But Poison Ivy is a character I’ve loved for a long time. I’m really interested in the way that she’s changed over the decades. I put more work into it than I would normally put into an eight-page short that goes into an anthology. I always try to put out my best work, but I was really going for an A plus plus.
Wilson: It caught the eye of editorial and they’re like, ‘Whoa, we’ve never quite seen this take on Poison Ivy before. Do you want to do a limited series?’ I was like, ‘Heck, yes. That sounds amazing.’ That did so well, that they were like, ‘Hey, do you want to do another 12 issues?’ I was like, yeah. Then they’re like, ‘You know what, let’s just make it an ongoing.’ This has never happened to me before.
I’d say the only downside is, being a realist in the publishing industry, I was planning for each of those endpoints to be actual endpoints. So it looks like it’s going to wrap up a couple different times, because they could just can us. I have to be prepared for that possibility and make the exit look very graceful. But as luck would have it, they just kept extending the series, because the fan response was so great. You know, the team is fantastic. Marcio [Takara] just knocks it out of the park. Hassan [Otsmane-Elhaou], our letter, is a genius. I feel like it’s a great team.
MOC: As a team, how do you marry it all together, with Ivy’s designs and how she looks?
Wilson: When it comes to the look and feel of her Poison Ivy costumes, not her civilian garb, that little work onesie that she’s been in; that was me, I was like, ‘Let’s make her look like she’s a gardener that you wouldn’t pick out on the street. Work boots, and then a cute little one-piece that she can tie around her waist that I will take credit for. But the rest of it, these unbelievably organic looking costumes, with the plant matter sort of coming up in little wisps. That was 100% Marcio. Depending on what artists I’m working with, I like to tailor the scripts to their strengths and what they’re interested in.
When I was doing Invisible Kingdom at Dark Horse, working with Chris Ward, he loves to do these huge epic, sweeping seascapes and sci-fi stuff. He’s doing all these double-page spreads. Nick Robles, who I worked with on [The Dreaming:] Waking Hours, he loves to do facial expressions and body language, we did all this close-up stuff.
With Marcio, everything looks so organic, almost in a creepy way. There’s an element of decay in everything. I really pushed the boat out in terms of the body horror in the book, because he was into it, he can handle it. He would send me art back and I would say, ‘Wow, Marcio, I thought what I wrote was gross, but this is super gross.’ He was like, ‘Are you kidding? This is in the scripts.’ Yeah, it’s a very simpatico group of people.
Hassan, the lettering in a series like this is really important. If it’s well done, the reader doesn’t notice it, because it’s so unobtrusive. Yet at the same time, when the series was Ivy writing letters to Harley, it’s all on note paper, and then there’s this transition period where she starts talking directly to us. The way that was handled was really good. Jessica Fong on covers. She’s like, ‘I’m gonna do a trypophobia thing’ and I don’t even want to look at it, because I’m gonna get freaked out but it’s amazing. Keep doing what you’re doing.
MOC: I personally love the progressive radicalness of the series. Climate change is a huge thing that we’re worried about. I interpret it as the Earth is changing for slightly worse and Ivy feels that on a metaphysical level. I’ve seen your takes on Twitter, how do you marry your ideals with Ivy, but also make it still a part of her story?
Wilson: That’s a really good question. What’s great about a character like Ivy, is that because she’s a villain, or at least villain-coded, she can say the things that we can’t. That gives you a lot of freedom that you wouldn’t have with a character who is a good guy and always tries to do the right thing. She does not always do the right thing, but she tries to do the necessary thing. Sometimes those two things diverge.
What I was trying to communicate with her is the urgency of the climate crisis, it’s not like we’ll swap out our light bulbs and stop drinking bottled water and everything will be fine. No, if we don’t turn this around fast, this car is going off a cliff. Life as we know it on this planet will be completely changed. Communicating the urgency that it’s not going to take your recycling campaign, there’s gonna have to be direct action. That’s not something that you can go around saying in your civilian life, without attracting notice from people you’d rather not, but she, as a fictional villain, can say all of those things.
It’s an interesting fine line to walk too, because she’s got to say all this stuff, but at the same time, she has to grow as a person. Otherwise, the story isn’t interesting. Having her navigate that, and go from the only way to save this planet is to eradicate human life, human life is the problem to ‘No, we are a part of that ecosystem.’ Really, the problem is the billionaire class and the people who are hiding their sins under the rug and greenwashing everything, I’m gonna go after them instead.
Working that in, so that she’s still a villain, because I think she’s less useful as a good guy as she is as a villain. At the same time, you see her growing, there’s bits of her story you can empathize with, she’s not so evil, that you’re just like, ‘Ugh, this is a terrible person.’ It’s an interesting challenge and that’s part of what I love. Living in her head. Although I have to say, I mainline all of the climate news for the book, and it is depressing out there. There’s not a lot of good news.
“Not losing sight of her main goal, which is to halt the destruction of the planet and hopefully mess up some billionaires.”
MOC: It is pretty depressing, but at least there’s lightness throughout, which I appreciate having Harley and Janet from HR, it lightens up the mood, but I appreciate the message within and I think a lot of fans do too. What are your plans going forward? Are we gonna see Ivy actually take on Bruce or someone of his ilk,or a famous billionaire in the comics? Are we gonna see that eventually?
Wilson: The answer to that is if they will let me, I would love to do one of those. Another one of the challenges of writing in a shared universe is you want to move the pieces around on the chessboard, but you can’t do it to such an extent that you’re messing up other people’s books, or the through line that carries throughout all the books. I put as many characters on the board that will work with respecting other people’s stories and the arcs that they have planned for all these characters. But there’s always stories that the timing doesn’t work out or the character is not who they used to be or something has changed or they’re not here right now. They’re on Neptune leading an uprising of aliens.
I tell people that writing superhero comics is like Iron Chef. You’ve got a bunch of ingredients under a cloth and you don’t know what you’ve got, until the cloth has been whipped off and you’re like, ‘Okay, sardines, frosting and maraschino cherries. What can I do with that?’ It’s part of the fun but also, you sometimes have to wait to do certain stories or not do certain stuff. But yeah, if they will let me use an actual DC billionaire, I would love to do that.
MOC: This new All In initiative, where do we see Poison Ivy falling into this?
Wilson: It just keeps getting bigger and better. In this second year, we’ve started to draw her a little bit more back into the DCU. Year one was just kind of her on a road trip. Year two, she gets drawn back into the DC universe, we see more of Harley. That’s been really great. I don’t want to spoil too many things, but you read the most recent issue.
There’s a big showdown with a character who’s been her nemesis for a long time. And she– I don’t want to use words like rebirth or reborn, you know, she changes in certain ways. Ivy wants to do more rebuilding and rewilding of the Earth, because she sees at the end of this mega arc that we’ve been on for the last two years, that as much as she wants to burn it all down, one of the most destructive things for the environment is war.
Ivy sees this firsthand, war is one of the worst things that we can do for the planet. She has to change strategies a little bit. Of course, her past doesn’t necessarily let her. We’re going to see some more DC characters come into her story. We’re going way back into the portfolio of nature-based characters. We’re bringing back some Alan Moore-era characters coming in, we’re reaching deep into the vaults. You get more of an interesting, quasi-magical, spiritual aspect, which is sort of getting into the mythology of the Green and some of the stuff that overlaps with Swamp Thing, for example.
One thing that just got announced that we’re super excited for, that fans have been asking for since day one is a Swamp Thing, Poison Ivy crossover. That is coming your way in October, it’s beautiful, Mike Perkins has done excellent, crazy things. We’re getting more into the mythology of the Green that’s had its own decades-long evolution in the DC universe, bringing some of those guys in. But not losing sight of her main goal, which is to halt the destruction of the planet and hopefully mess up some billionaires.
MOC: I wanted to talk about Feral Trees. First, who is this version of Swamp Thing? Is it Alec or Levi?
Wilson: The strict instructions were to make it unclear. Ivy, herself, raises kind of that exact question in the book and gets a nonspecific answer. We’re supposed to just think of him as Swamp Thing.
MOC: I read the synopsis. I have the exact quote, ‘calling out for blood. In its wake, a trail of viscera and carnage is left’ is this a reference to the Red? Is it bleeding into the Green?
Wilson: You could interpret it that way if you wanted to. The premise of the story is there is a forest outside Gotham that has started killing people. The trees are murdering people. Ivy and Swamp Thing, because of their intrinsic connection to the Green, both feel this and of their own accord, come to this place, and together have to figure out what has turned the trees. What’s happening here? It’s almost like a murder mystery. We have to unspool why the trees have turned on people. There is, because you know me, and it’s Swamp Thing, it’s Ivy, there’s some more body horror. It is about what happens when the Earth itself starts calling the shots. In this case, it’s the literal trees turning on humans and eating them. They have to figure out why.
It’s beautiful. It takes place in winter. With these characters, we think of them, because everything is green and growing, you think of spring-summer. I was like, ‘What if these are trees and there’s no leaves, there’s snow on the ground.’ Ivy and Swamp Thing look different. They’re in more autumnal colors. It’s really good.
MOC: Their personalities, their mission, do they clash?
Wilson: This was a perfect opportunity to show both the overlap and how they are incredibly different. Both versions of Swamp Thing, mentally he’s fading further and further into the Green, he still has some humanity. But he’s an avatar of something much larger. Ivy, on the other hand, still has very human impulses, very human instincts. Her relationship with the Green is a little bit more fraught. She’s more likely to act individualistically, according to what she feels in the moment. In most iterations of her, not all, but in most, she is less occulted within the Green.
They definitely butt heads. It’s a really cool thing to do. This is the first time I’ve gotten to write Swamp Thing. He’s a tough character to do. Like Ivy, he’s different depending on what incarnation he’s in. Getting that tone right, trying to make it feel to other longtime Swamp Thing readers that like, ‘Okay, this is a character I know and love.’ At the same time telling a new story was an interesting challenge.
MOC: I was gonna ask if that was a big challenge, what was the most challenging part? Was it getting his voice right?
“How people end up as supervillains.”
Wilson: Oh, so challenging. I’d go back and forth with the editors and they’d want more ellipses. I’d add more ellipses and I’m like this doesn’t feel quite right. Then I’d go back and read some of the Ram V stuff and the most current versions of Swamp Thing to try to get a feel for it. Yeah, his voice is difficult to capture, for sure.
MOC: Fans have obviously been asking for more Ivy crossovers, I think an Aquaman/Poison Ivy crossover about the climate would be dope. Are there other characters you want Ivy to cross over with? Do you write to do more stories like that?
Wilson: Absolutely. Literally anything they want to give me. An Aquaman crossover would be amazing. Putting her back into the Gotham ecosystem a little bit more. That’s why I brought in Croc, who I love. Solomon Grundy, another challenging character. He speaks in the lines of one poem and whatever mileage you can get out of each of those lines is what you’ve got to work with. Putting her back in that environment is fun. I would love to draw in some of those more peripheral Bat-villains, possibly more of the Bat-family. There’s a Bat-family cameo in the most recent issue.
[Spoiler alert: Jason Todd/Red Hood shows up in Poison Ivy #23]
Wilson: Anytime we can get him on the page, it’s great. I love the Bat-verse. Anytime we can bring those storylines in is great. Regardless of what Bruce is off doing, finding himself outside of giving up his fortune and living in a brownstone.
MOC: Will we see Bella Garten again?
Wilson: Yes, we definitely will. We’re gonna we’re going to see quite a bit of her. She was another fun one to bring in, in flashbacks, in this year two Poison Ivy and build on that James Tynion [IV] mythology, getting to know all of those characters. Actually, when I started I asked how technically available are they today? Are they alive alive? Are they not? Getting to bring in the Black Orchid character and the OG Swamp Thing and co, Bella Garten; be able to see them in the lab with Woodrue, show what this very coercive control can look like in that scenario and how people end up as supervillains has been amazing. Anytime we get to revisit those characters, that’s great.
Halloween is coming. Poison Ivy / Swamp Thing: Feral Trees #1 (October 2024) There is something wrong with the trees. A presence screaming out in pain–tearing, gnashing, and gnawing through the very fabric of the Green–calling out for blood. In its wake, a trail of viscera and carnage is left–leading to a mystery that the Parliament of Trees has conscripted Poison Ivy and Swamp Thing to solve. Can the Verdant Villainess and the Avatar of the Green make their way into the heart of this homicidal wilderness and discover the source of this horror, or will they find themselves the next victims of these feral trees? This story, brought to violent life by G. Willow Wilson and Mike Perkins, will answer these questions. But beware, this terrifying tale is not for the weak of heart.