I admire DC’s restraint that they did not call the fourth volume of G. Willow Wilson’s title “Poison Ivy: Year One,” but Poison Ivy Vol. 4: Origin of the Species. (That it’s just three issues didn’t stop them with the even less-origin-y Batman Vol. 3: Joker: Year One.)

As is Wilson’s purview in writing the definitive Poison Ivy series, she goes back to the beginning here. No huge surprises, I don’t think, but Wilson’s origin strongly promotes some motifs of the series; it also fleshes out well some interesting side characters.

For this six-issue book, three issues are the origin and then three issues are Ivy fighting a related threat in the present day. For me, the all-too-real horror of everyday life in the first half was scarier than what essentially becomes a superhero monster battle in the second. As well, as the talk of blurred lines between heroes and villains ramps up toward the end, I felt Wilson erred too far on the side of Ivy being heroic and happy. Maybe I’ve got my priorities wrong, but I was gripped more when Ivy was spreading death across the country than her putting that all behind her.

[Review contains spoilers]

Bella Garten, or “The Gardener” (it seems sillier now that I write it), was one of many new characters to come out of James Tynion’s Batman run — one whom, it felt, Tynion perhaps left the title before he had a chance to use as intended. I’m not sure there’s market for a second Poison Ivy, such that with Tynion’s departure, the Gardner seemed destined to live out her days in limbo. Much credit to Wilson, then, for taking this recent but easily overlooked addition to Ivy’s mythos and making her canon by including Bella in this story.

Again, in the broad strokes there isn’t much here that isn’t in Poison Ivy Vol. 1: The Virtuous Cycle — Jason Woodrue, the charming and abusive professor, seducing and then experimenting on student Pamela Isley. But over three issues, Wilson has lots of room to dig into Woodrue’s machinations, from posing bonus questions that can only be answered in his secluded office hours to separating the female students from the male ones under the guise of egalitarianism, to all the ways Woodrue convinces Pamela to take greater and greater risks by giving her less and less attention. We already know the mistakes that will be made and how this will end, but seeing it unfold piece by piece is convincingly creepy.

This level of detail is useful also because, aside from plant zombies and mind-controlling fungus, Poison Ivy has largely been a story about toxic workplaces and all the reasons — for money, for health care, for stature — we have to put up with them. Even before a sentient Venus flytrap takes off, Pamela is sleeping on the lab floor to get her work done and bad boss Woodrue is shouting at the slightest mistake. A lot of whom Ivy has gone after have been supervisors and CEOs; we knew why, but now we really know why.

Insofar as the story is also the Gardner’s origins, we see here the first of her trademark ferocious plant-monster pets (what seems to be her defining “superpower”). I do hope Wilson is reintroducing Bella in order to use her in an upcoming story; while I do think one Poison Ivy is good and two Poison Ivies is reductive, I also think Wilson did well creating a “rogue” for Ivy in Undine, and the Gardner would be logical and fitting as well.

As discussed with Poison Ivy Vol. 3: Mourning Sickness, Wilson emphasizes the question of what it means to be a hero or a villain, particularly as it comes to the conundrum of “save the world by destroying it” Poison Ivy. Here, Wilson complicates it with the suggestion that “geniuses are allowed to play by different rules”; Woodrue abuses that adage to bad ends, but equally Pamela uses it to shake off her own timid tendencies.

Wilson beats the anti-hero (or anti-villain) drum fairly hard toward the end, between the evil Woodrue wondering, “When did the criminals of Gotham develop moral principles?” and Killer Croc assuring Ivy’s sidekick Janet that they’ll survive the zombie apocalypse because “us lowlifes always are [OK] in the end.” Wilson doesn’t quite reach the gravitas of the villain collective in Gail Simone’s Secret Six, but it’s all twisted well when Harley Quinn sees fit to let Janet die so she can save Ivy; if we’re meant to see honor among thieves, we’re also reminded that they’re still thieves at heart.

But this all goes on long enough that I thought Wilson gets treacly. Ivy’s sacrifice inspires Harley to reverse course and save Janet, before charging into battle with a shout of “We ain’t heroes, but we’re the next best thing!” — about the point in which the story pontificating its themes becomes too much. And emerging from all of this seems a kinder, gentler Ivy; “Will it take violence to save what is left of the Earth,” she asks. “Probably. But the romantic in me still hopes we can save it some other way.” That’s good for Ivy, I guess, though the site of this book’s horror in the beginning was Ivy’s cross-country murder spree, and I’m hopeful it’ll be as interesting with Ivy preferring to avoid conflict. Not every villain book, I think, means the villain has to become a hero.

Don’t miss that in Poison Ivy Vol. 4: Origin of the Species, G. Willow Wilson and guest artist Haining pull off a jump scare. That’s a terribly hard thing to do in a comic with no music and no sound, but we’ve got the page where Croc throws an arm stump out the window and then the next page, “Hraah,” a whole zombie’s jumping in, and that’s a great use of comics pacing for scariness. I felt the Poison Ivy series lost a step in this book, but hopefully that’s only temporary.

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