Angola in the Comics #9: Poison Ivy: Cycle of Life and Death #1

Welcome to another entry in my occasional series, Angola in the Comics where I explore those rare times in which Angola has appeared as the setting of a comic book. This time out it's Poison Ivy: Cycle of Life Death #1, the first issue of a six-issue limited series from 2016. I won't be examining the entire series - in fact, I'm only going to look at the first few pages of issue #1 because it's the only part which concerns Angola. The story is written by Amy Chu and drawn by Clay Mann & Seth Mann.

We are, of course, looking a story where the protagonist is a villain. Poison Ivy is a long-time Batman villain but, like most of his enemies, she's acquired a healthy fanbase of her own, hence the mini-series.

We open in the deserts of southern Angola, where an African fellow named Dr. Nepolo is driving a jeep containing Dr. Pamela Isley, the civilian identity of Poison Ivy. Dr. Nepolo brings Isley to the site of a welwitschia, which is Isley's reason for being here. Now, she didn't have to go all the way to Angola to find one as they are also found in Namibia and as she's entering Angola from the south, she would have had opportunities to find one there. But this is all very accurate. The welwitschia is indeed a very rare plant (found only in Angola & Namibia). On my 2nd visit to Angola, my uncle insisted on show one to me; we didn't have to offroading in the desert like Isley, though - we could see one from the highway as we were driving through Namibe and he pulled over, then took me to see it. The weltwitschia is one of the oldest plants in existence.

Sure enough, the creators bring up these details - Dr. Nepolo identifies the plant as "at least 2000 years old." That's quite a statement based only on visual evidence - I believe the plant does become bigger with time, but heck, it looks about the same size as the one I saw by Namibe and it was less than a thousand years old.

Isley crouches down next to the plant, telling Dr. Nepolo she's having a "conversation" with it. This is something Poison Ivy does all the time in the comics, but of course Dr. Nepolo doesn't realize he's working with a super-villain and raises his eyebrow at this. Then they pull out shovels and start digging. It occurs to me that for all of Poison Ivy's claims that she is a protector of the plants, she's uprooting a unique specimen from its native habitat just so she can place it under her own care, really no better than those who capture animals for zoos. What I'm saying is, maybe super-villains don't have a moral code.

Before they can finish digging the plant out, a truck pulls out and two men emerge, brandishing guns. Dr. Nepolo identifies them as men from the nearby diamond mines. That's a little strange, as Angola's most fertile diamond fields are way, way up in the north, but I guess it's not impossible... on the other hand, the men speak perfect English, which is also not what you'd expect to find in southern Angola. The men accuse Isley and Nepolo of trespassing, but Ivy causes the welwitschia to spring to life and ensnare one of the men. The scene shifts to "48 hours later" as Isley finishes depositing the welwitschia in the Gotham Botanical Gardens. That's quite a feat, safely unearthing a plant that old... but putting it in a hothouse in the northern United States? Considering the welwitschia requires such an exact desert climate in order to thrive, I don't think a hothouse is the right place for it. And I definitely think there are safer cities than Gotham, considering how often that city seems to burn to the ground. What I'm saying is, maybe super-villains are not the brightest people around.

Anyway, this was a pretty minor appearance of Angola and although you could quibble about the details, they got a lot of things right!

• +2 estrelas for using the weltwitschia, a plant found in southern Angola
• +1 estrela for correctly identifying Angola as a place where diamonds are found.

TOTAL SCORE: Três estrelas!