Poison Ivy/Swamp Thing: Feral Trees #1 review

Well here’s a surprise, a team-up of two DC characters that isn’t linked to an event book. It’s a done-in-one that can be enjoyed on its own. And I did enjoy it. A lot.

Both connected to the Green, our hero and anti-heroine are drawn to a place where dark events are occurring. For example.

It isn’t long before they meet in the woods outside Gotham.

At every turn they find bodies, along with beings from Swamp Thing’s world. Here’s the first.

It turns out that anyone connected to the Green is being called to the scene, including Swamp Thing’s predecessors in the Parliament of Trees. And at least one of them has questions for Ivy.

Swampy, too, challenges Ivy, in a scene that’s typical of G Willow Wilson’s excellent script and Mike Perkins’ ravishing art; seriously, if you passed over this issue, go back and get it physically or digitally. I don’t know, perhaps you can even manifest it from The Green.

The overarching mystery is fascinating, the cameos delightful, but best of all are those interactions between the leads. I’m sticking to calling them Poison Ivy and Swamp Thing because while I know this is Pamela Isley, I don’t know which Swampy we have… unless I’ve missed something, the story never tells us if this is the Alec Holland version or the ‘Fetch’ version, Levi Kamei. Wilson seems to be having fun with the question in that panel with Ivy asking ‘Literally? Metaphorically?’ Alec went to college with Ivy, but Levi has met her too… I don’t actually know if Alec is still around, having given up on Levi after a few issues of his series. Hmm, the logo on Jason Shawn Alexander’s striking cover is Levi’s, and the interior artist worked on his series… but it feels like Alec.

So absorbing is the story that I was able to put the question to one side and enjoy proceedings, especially the question of Ivy’s relationship with The Green… for years she’s been torn between the worlds of Man and Plant, must she finally pick a side? I loved her frustration at the Green guests’ attitude to the mystery of suddenly sadistic trees – be patient and all will be revealed.

As for Swampy, over the years the Alec version has certainly had moments when he’s lost faith in mankind, and he’s on cool form here, but not without compassion. Ivy, though – perhaps, in part, due to her relationship with Harley Quinn – is all empathy. There’s a great moment which sums up Ivy’s unpredictable nature over the last several years.

Mike Perkins conjures up the mood on the first page and never lets it waver. The sequence of a man walking his dog is lovely, splashes of Ivy and Swampy sleeping in mirror poses are nifty introductions to the protagonists and the quest through the forest gripping. Perkins is a superb storyteller and the presence of brilliant colour artist Mike Spicer and innovative letterer Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou means there’s a unity of tone to the pages of this 40pp tale. All members of the creative team, under the auspices of editors Arianna Turturro and Ben Meares, are in sync, their only goal to tell a winter’s tale with two of DC’s most powerful and mysterious dwellers.

And this they do beautifully.