So Much Plant Butt

3.5/5 stars. The history and breadth of the collection is awesome – you get a lot of bang for the buck. The art is just so embarrassing to carry around I couldn’t give it four stars. That’s my review. 

As I’ve posted on previous reviews of Ivy-centric books, I kind of fell in love with the morally ambiguous Ivy I first came across in the recent Batman video games. To learn more, I bought this book in the intriguing Batman Arkham series. In this newish series of books from DC, several of Batman’s most famous villains each get their own book. They’re explored in detail via a collection of some of their best stories throughout the decades in a single trade paperback collection. It’s a nice, inexpensive way to learn more about a character without having to track down rare and pricey single issues from the days of yore. A nice thing about a collection like this is that its a comic book mixtape. The art and stories vary so widely that even if not all of the collection rings your bell, you’ll find at least some that do.

In Ivy, the stories span over 50 years. Ivy starts out as a man-crazed she-devil and turns into an enigmatic eco-warrior with her own set of rules. Writers ilke Neil Gaiman, John Francis More, and Gerry Conway frequent the pages. The art also varies by artist and time period, although one constant seems to be panels of green spandex and/or flora riding up Ivy’s butt cheeks. I don’t know where the line between sexy and annoying is, but I think this book is on the wrong side of that line most of the times. It’s kind of like how Wonder Woman looks in the Wonder Woman movie vs. the Justice League movie. Same clothes, one is strong and the other is way pervy.