Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Wilted
Written By: Amy Chu
Art By: Clay Mann, Stephen
Segovia, Seth Mann, Jonathan Glapion, Dexter Vines, Art Thibert, Ulises Arreola
Letters By:
Janice Chiang
Cover Price: $2.99
Release Date: March 16, 2016
*Non-Spoilers and Score At The Bottom*
Do you think plants ever
plot revenge? Like, if you are a really shitty houseplant-owner, and only
half-assedly water your spider plant so that it teeters between life and mulch,
the tips of its slender leaves a perpetual paper bag brown, do you think it
dreams of slithering its tendrils around your neck and choking the goddamned
life out of you? I like to think flora is not that petty. If plants really
wanted revenge on people, it would fairly well be over in about sixty seconds.
And don’t give me that mess about them “needing us” to exchange carbon dioxide
for oxygen, there are plenty of other mammals on the planet with whom ferns
have no problem. And we’ve left such a carbon stink in the air, the superweeds
that inherit the Earth will be munching on it for centuries. So plants probably
aren’t out to kill us at the moment, though maybe you should be a little more
respectful and water them more often anyway. And while you’re at it, read my
review of Poison Ivy #3. Maybe
they’ll think you’re trying to empathize.
Explain It!:
We dive back into the
mystery of Why Is Everyone at Gotham Botanical Gardens Dying with Detectives
O’Shea and Manning (who must be working the city parks beat) investigating the
desiccated corpse of Dr. Eric Grimley, one-time Head Misogynist at the Botanical
Gardens. Being that this is the second corpse jerky to show up in the last
couple of days, the detectives decide to actually do some police work and
informally interrogate Darshan, the guy with a haircut like a rooster who
discovered both bodies. But they don’t take him to the station, or advise him
of his rights, no they just have an informal discussion in the hallway where
Darshan informs the cops that he heard a noise in Dr. Grimley’s office, and
when he opened the door someone…or something
whooshed out. That seems to sit just fine with the detectives, who recently won
an award for Worst Fucking Cops in the History of Municipal Police at a gala
event for the Police Benevolence Association.
Back at her loft in Canal
Point, Dr. Pamela “Poison Ivy” Isley is hanging with her new plant-human hybrid
babies that she cracked out of a couple of cabbages last issue. She muses in
her usual goth-talk but now has a weird, colored speech bubble that indicates
she’s got plant-voice or something. Pamela notes that her two tots are
developing rather quickly, since this is only a six-issue miniseries after all,
and each has a distinct trait: one is adept at talking to leafy things while
the other is skilled at growing them. I think we can essentially say that both
babies are good with plants. They start crying, so Pamela decides to get the
hell out of there and stuffs them in some giant flowers. I hear ya, sister,
many is the time I’ve wished I could shove a crying baby into a giant flower or
some kind of pneumatic chute to nowhere. In fact, I think it’s a service that
should be provided by movie theaters and houses of worship. Over at the Gotham
Gardens, Pamela discovers the crime scene and insists on getting to her lab to
investigate her stolen research. Darshan is incredulous but Isley strolls right
over to Detectives Dumb and Dumber and demands that they let her pass. They
begin to inconvenience her slightly and Pamela goes into a murderous reverie,
thinking of how easy it would be to turn these chumps into plant food, when a
call comes over the radio from the Chief that Dr. Isley is not to be detained.
Everyone, including Pamela, is surprised at this turn of events, but she plays
it cool and strolls away in her super stiff model pose. As the two detectives
check out Pamela’s butt, O’Shea notes how site director Victor Lee seems
suspicious because he didn’t seem to broken up over Dr. Grimley’s dehydration,
and it’s a good thing because he only shows up in a clustered panel two pages
back and I’d already forgotten he existed.
Arriving back at home,
Pamela sees her place looks a wreck! She calls out to her babies—Hazel and
Rose, incidentally—and they’re doing fine all nestled into some busted up
orchids or something. As she cuddles them to her bosom, Pamela senses a disturbance
in the Green, which is like the Force but for people with leaf powers. Just
then we see a shadowed beast monster all hovering over Isley and her babes, but
when she turns around it is gone. Then, her doorbell rings: it’s Winston, a
creepy guy from work who got Pamela off the hook last issue by claiming they
were fucking while Dr. Luisa Cruz died. Pamela ascertains that he’s alone, and
then invites him up and murders him in order to fulfill her quota for the
issue. The cool part is that she besets a bunch of ravenous venus fly traps on
him like a pack of wild dogs. Then her doorbell rings again: it’s Darshan.
Pamela wisely decides they should meet at a restaurant down the block.
Darshan’s got a bunch of old blueprints of the Botanical Gardens that might
highlight a weak spot where they can break in. They notice that an old, unused
wing of the Gardens has an awful lot of security, and of course that’s exactly
where Pamela wants to go. But first, they need to enlist the help of an old
roommate: Catwoman!
So this issue had some
decent story development, with a lot of incidental things that just didn’t sit
right. Like the detectives, who don’t even know the phony police procedure you
see on Law & Order. Or the fact that Pamela killed Winston for being a douchebag.
He was a douchebag, but couldn’t she
just give him foot fungus or something? And the whole thing with her creepy
babies is just creepy. I am still interested in where this story is going, but
frankly if it wasn’t a miniseries I’d probably drop it here. And the art is…inconsistent.
Not surprising, considering the battalion of pencilers and inkers on the thing,
but it vacillates between really nice renderings and then some postures and
anatomy that are good enough for a high school yearbook. I hope next issue is
mind-blower, because my faith in this book is starting to wane.
Bits and Pieces
Another day, another dead
doctor at the Gotham Botanical Gardens, and it seems like the culprit might be
some whooshing werewolf thing, or maybe the guy with the rooster hair, or possibly
the dude that runs the whole facility that I almost forgot about. Pamela’s
plant babies are gross but her parenting skills are top notch. The art in this
book is top notch in some places, and somewhat unfortunate in others. This
much-heralded book seems to be going down the tubes.
6.5/10
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