Detective Comics #23.1

Issue Details

Synopsis

THE GREEN KINGDOM Gotham City is in chaos - and Batman is nowhere to be found. Poison Ivy intends to take advantage. With no one to stop her, she can take Gotham back to nature, and she is aided in this by the human response to the pheromones her plants fill the air with. As she wanders the streets, she is given pause by a scene of domestic abuse, where a separated couple argue over the custody of their daughter, who cowers nearby.   It reminds her of her own childhood. She had been born with a skin condition - an aversion to sunlight. Though the doctor had prescribed her a lotion to protect her, little Pamela's abusive father had forbade her from going outside. On one occasion, when her mother allowed her to play outside, he had angrily punched her in the face, giving her a black eye. As if nothing had happened, Pamela's mother stepped outside and began gardening. Seeing her daughter there, she explained that she liked gardening because the flowers listen to her, and sometimes, if she stays very quiet, they speak back to her. When Pamela had asked about the black eye, her mother had assured her it was nothing to worry about. The abuse continued. Every time he hit her, Pamela's father bought his wife's forgiveness with flowers, and her garden would grow. That was how Pamela learned that flowers could manipulate people.   As the man is about to hit his ex-wife, he is surprised when vines shoot up from the ground, and drag him up into the air. Ivy calls up to him, warning that the vines will squeeze until there is nothing left of him. She offers the mother and daughter the opportunity to watch, leave, or try to free him, but adds that if they do try to free him, she cannot guarantee their safety.   Ivy makes her way to Robinson Park and the Botanical Gardens, where a once green refuge is now a blazing inferno, thanks to crazed citizens, who revel in its destruction. It reminds her of how her own father had killed her mother, and buried her beneath her flower garden. From that crime, she learned that the best way to control those around her, she would have to maintain control over herself. Even so, she turns to the arsonists, and explains that she finds it as easy to attack them now as they did to attack the flowers. The difference, though, is that the damage done to the flowers is temporary; they will grow back. These fellows, however, will remain buried and forgotten, as they are pulled down under the ground by her vines and lost in the soil.   In college, Pamela created designer drugs, doling pheromone pills out in order to study their effects. The University learned of her activities, and she was expelled and put in jail pending a criminal indictment. However, she had already used her pills to get the Dean under her thumb. Charges were dropped, and she graduated Summa Cum Laude.   Elsewhere in the park, Ivy encounters a gang of thugs who warn her to get off of their turf. She responds by bringing the earth itself to life around them, boasting that this turf answers only to her.   After graduating, Pamela visited her father in prison for the first time since the murder. He had stubbornly sat in silence, just staring at her and waiting for her to make the first move. After a time, she decided to do what made the most sense. She leapt up out of her seat and kissed him. By the next morning, he was dead, and the toxin used to kill him was untraceable.   A pair of GCPD Officers nearly run Ivy down, but wind up slamming into a telephone pole at the last second. Rather than help them, Ivy complains of how Gotham's Finest failed her and her family. Within seconds of feeling her kiss, both men are dead.   Pamela landed an internship at Wayne Enterprises straight out of College at their R&D site just after the merger with Kane Chemical. She helped to develop pharmaceuticals and cosmetic applications, but she had greater aspirations. When Bruce Wayne came to look in on her division, she took the opportunity to present him with a business project that would cut his advertising division by 100%. In fact, she had used pheromones to get the meeting with him, and this was her proof that Wayne Enterprises could use pheromones to target clients, and modify their behavior to the company's benefit. Wayne refused her pitch on the grounds that it amounted to brainwashing, and removed free choice from the equation. Ethically opposed to her idea, Bruce Wayne fired her on the spot, warning that his company owned any research she had done, so she would not be able to pitch her idea elsewhere.   Angrily, she had rushed past security to steal what she could of her work back. Unfortunately, in the process, she was doused with her own chemicals. The chemicals changed her, making her immune to poisons and viruses, giving her command over any plant, and connecting her inexorably to The Green. She became something of an eco-terrorist, using her abilities to strike back at those who struck out at the Green. She was asked to join the Birds of Prey, but quit when they outgrew their usefulness.   Now, Ivy has returned to Wayne Tower, and she has decided that because the company helped to create her, she will give something back. Without Batman, Gotham will stop being a selfish, criminal reflection of him. She rigs an explosion in the chemical lab, and watches from atop GCPD Headquarters as it ignites. In the aftermath, all of Gotham is covered in plants; a concrete jungle replaced by a real one. Without Batman to get in her way, this Green Kingdom will flourish.