The second volume of G. Willow Wilson’s Poison Ivy, while still infused with body horror, tried to veer toward the topical. But bits like Ivy putting lie to “Gwendolyn Caltrope”’s wellness empire felt too on the nose, less clever than perhaps was hoped. The Ivy series is of course always going to have an environmental bent, but I’m glad to see Poison Ivy Vol. 3: Mourning Sickness to be more of a return to form — less satire, more plant monsters and Ivy being self-destructive.

Poison Ivy has always been a conundrum — someone ostensibly working to save the world, though unconcerned about the collateral damage to do it. The question of hero versus villain has only become more thorny both in the character increasingly teamed with Harley Quinn (herself having undergone a meta villain-to-hero transition) and with Ivy getting her own series. Mourning Sickness wrestles with this mightily, as sidekick Janet, once an everyday HR rep, now finds herself hitting Batman, and all that stands between Gotham and a zombie apocalypse are “villains” Ivy, Killer Croc, and Solomon Grundy. It’s no wonder Batman’s mostly fighting new villains these days; the old ones are at this point essentially good guys.

[Review contains spoilers]

A surprising amount turns on Killer Croc in Mourning Sickness, once a Batman villain but really, he’s come so far and we’ve seen so many sides of Croc that it’s awful hard to think of him as truly a bad guy any more. It’s a chance meeting with Croc that sends Ivy into the building where she meets plant monster Undine; it’s Croc who saves her; and it’s Croc that Wilson uses as the book’s unlikely chorus. When the building falls on Undine, it’s Croc who delivers the story’s “ambition makes us arrogant” moral, and it’s Croc’s story of his fear of needles that stops the book short, an astounding moment of heart apropos of nothing. Between Ivy, Harley, Janet, Croc, Grundy, Undine, Batman, and the Floronic Man, Ivy risks not having enough pages to curate its characters adequately, but Croc’s far from the first one I’d jettison.

Croc is only one of many here blurring the lines between hero and villain; when Ivy gets Batman grudgingly on board with making zombie cures, then surely Ivy and company can no longer be “bad guys.” Pointedly, the first person Ivy encounters in Gotham is Catwoman Selina Kyle, verily the epitome of anti-hero; as Undine says later, “There are no villains here. Only unexpected possibilities.” When faced with Batman, Janet makes “a choice that determines all other choices,” the narrative tells us, socking Batman with her purse. She later asks Harley, “Are we the bad guys in this story” and Harley’s reply is veritably the theme for the series: “Most people switch sides at least once. So the question doesn’t make sense.”

Underscoring that point, Janet and Harley proceed to sleep together, after Ivy slept with Janet (and others), and Ivy and Harley are a couple. It’s not complicated, but it’s not complicated in the way the rest of the book also requires larger questions of good and evil to be uncomplicated. It’s Janet, new to the anti-hero life, who’s having trouble with it (“I am committing so many HR violations!”), and Janet too who can’t quite close the circle by making friends with Croc when she meet him. I tend to think Janet will last in this book, but I’m reminded of a decade back, Sean Ryan’s odd, interstitial New Suicide Squad run, where Amanda Waller had a secretary, Bonnie, who was enmeshed in the machinations but so good-hearted you knew it couldn’t end well. I’m curious what fate will befall Janet when Wilson finally wraps it up.

The best of Mourning Sickness, however, is its midpoint, which leaves most of those characters and considerations aside. Ivy is here for “Just Power Through It,” but even she’s crowded out by the simple story of “Chuck,” real name unknown, unwitting victim of the lamia spores. To an extent the fourth chapter (issue #16) hearkens back to the best of the first volume, if not DC’s superhero-horror titles in general: a normal person, superhero-horror adjacent, whose day devolves into nightmare in 22 pages. Though whether there’s any way Chuck could have avoided his zombie transformation is debatable, the “real horror” is how Chuck doesn’t seek help because he’s so dependent on keeping his employer happy (another of Ivy’s themes).

I was mildly put off in the initial Undine story when Ivy steps through a door into an Escher-style hallway, as if opening an entryway into the Tower of Fate. I might be too particular, but Ivy’s got enough sci-fi horror without the devoutly supernatural, thanks. But there’s a pseudo-scientific explanation, a semi-sentient metal, which evolves into a murderous high-rise. Shades of House of Leaves — Ivy being tormented by a malevolent skyscraper is a story I can get behind, better again and more demonstrative than Poison Ivy Vol. 2: Unethical Consumption’s spate of Ivy telling off CEOs.

Hip as I am to DC’s game now, my thought on finishing G. Willow Wilson’s Poison Ivy Vol. 3: Mourning Sickness is that this whole thing is going to be a dynamite omnibus some day. I’m about to read a bunch of Ivy books and I hope they all hold up; as I’ve said before, this series is special, and drawn with aplomb, I should mention, by series artist Marcio Takara, plus Luana Vecchio, A. L. Kaplan, and some perhaps out-of-place pages (but who’s complaining) by Guillem March and Kelley Jones.

[Includes original covers, variant cover gallery, cover sketches]