Anyway... all this came about because I thought that Batman villains, pre-villainizing-crisis, would be an awesome set of costumes, and I wanted to be Poison Ivy as an angry grad student, like so:
Pre-Ivy Pamela. I still think this would be the most awesome line party costume for TDK. And then I think, "You are a colossal nerd."
Pamela being all seductive. You can tell because she's wearing makeup. And it looks kind of crazy, but I'm guessing she wouldn't have practiced that much so that's ok. And I'm also not good at drawing it. Man, that's hideous.She's also bending the rules of perspective and shape here.
First version Ivy. Post-murder, mid-manic high. I think she's in a greenhouse with a tree? Colleges have those, right? Gotham State does, anyway.
Ivy showin' the treehuggers how it's done. Oh, and bending the laws of space again.
Ivy has something she wants to discuss with you. This is way far past the made-up origin story. This is just good ol' Poison Ivy.
And here's the good one! The boots are crappy, and the left eye got screwed up, and there's some shading difficulties, but I really like this version of Ivy and the way the picture turned out.DON'T READ ANY OF THE FOLLOWING UNLESS YOU ARE CONFUSED AND CURIOUS ABOUT ANY OF THE PICTURES.
Poison Ivy is one of my favorite Bat-villains, which is weird, because I think she has a crappy backstory, a crappy modus operandi, not much character depth and the unfortunate Walking Stereotype syndrome that affects so many comic book characters. But she is a redhead. So I like her anyway.
Well, actually, it's not as shallow as all that. Batman villainesses (and comic book villainesses in general) have the inconvenient habit of becoming more and more sympathetic, usually because they fall in love with Batman or vice versa. Ivy has always been a bad guy. And she's always been meant to stand on her own (after initially not catching on, she was introduced as a standalone villainess as a response to the feminist call for more independent female characters). However, I can't help but think that if they were trying to create a good backstory for an independent female villain, they could have done a lot better than: (pre-crisis) promising botanist is seduced into helping a man with a theft, then he tries to kill her with poisonous herbs (but it doesn't work! it gives her superpowers! when will these people ever learn?); or, (post-crisis) promising, shy, easily swayed advanced botanical chemistry student is seduced by her professor, who injects her with plant toxins, which almost kill her, but instead drive her insane, give her mood swings, and apparently give her killer fungus powers (who knew?).
Good lord, I didn't want to write this much today. Maybe I'll elaborate on it later. But suffice it to say that in my head, Ivy is a usually quiet but Greenpeace-type grad student in botany whose thesis work is on psychotropic compounds found in a certain kind of plant, which causes manic, borderline-psychotic behavior, which among other things will increase high-risk behaviors like extreme sexuality and violence (which plays right into the walking-redhead-stereotype identity Ivy has forged over the years). After corporate interests and a corrupt advisor result in her thesis being discredited in peer review and herself kept from finishing off grad school, she exposes herself to the psychotropic toxins and gets all juiced up (the way you might drink one last shot before starting a fistfight) to seduce and kill her professor. Although she meant it to be a one-off deal, wherein no one would suspect her because of the inherent sexuality and daring involved in the crime, the high is thrilling and she continues her life of crime. Part of the reason I like the manic idea is that it makes it possible for her to be a walking stereotype for some other reason than her hair color; the other reason is that manics have a sort of happiness and innocence around them, and a feeling of invincibility, in addition to a kind of freewheeling sexuality and disregard for the lives of others, that I think fits this tree-hugger and killer quite well. I like my insanity to be specific. It's more interesting that way.
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