Poison Ivy

Pamela Isley grows up wealthy with emotionally distant parents. She later studies advanced botanical biochemistry at a university with Alec Holland under Dr. Jason Woodrue. Isley, a timid, shrinking violet, is easily seduced by her professor. Woodrue injects Isley with poisons and toxins as an experiment, causing her transformation. She nearly dies twice as a result from these poisonings, driving her insane. Later Woodrue flees from the authorities, leaving Pamela in the hospital for six months. Enraged at the betrayal, Pamela suffers from violent mood swings, being sweet one moment and like poison the next. When her boyfriend has a car accident after mysteriously suffering from a massive fungal overgrowth, Isley drops out of school and leaves Seattle, eventually settling in Gotham City.

Taking the costumed persona of Poison Ivy, she begins a criminal career and sets out to show her power over men. Her first scheme involved threatening to release her suffocating spores into the air unless the city meets her demands. The Batman, who appears in Gotham that very same year, thwarts her scheme, and she is incarcerated in Arkham Asylum for the Criminally Insane. From this point on, she has a kind of obsession with Batman, he being the only person she could not control. Over the years, she develops plant-like superpowers, the most noticeable being a lethal toxin in her lips; she is able to literally kill with a kiss.

Poison Ivy escaped from Arkham Asylum again and again, more often seducing her guards in order to make her getaway. She soon became a frequent member of Batman's Rogues Gallery, often committing robberies to fund her cause for preservation of all plant life. Poison Ivy soon came into conflict with many other heroes in her insane quest, such as Superman and Wonder Woman. She fought the Justice League at least once and joined the Injustice Gang to help oppose them.

Poison Ivy also offered her talents as one of the world's leading experts on plant properties to the Secret Society of Super-Villains, although in recent years she appears to have left the team.

She hated all of humanity in many ways for the damage they had done to the world's flora. She allowed herself to temporarily sideline her mission to join the Suicide Squad. Under the direction of Amanda Waller, she served on several missions.

At times, Ivy demonstrates positive, even maternal traits. When Gotham City is destroyed in an earthquake, rather than fight over territory like most of Batman's enemies, she holds dominion over Robinson Park and turns it into a tropical paradise. Sixteen children who are orphaned during the quake come to live with her, as she sympathizes with them, having suffered a traumatic childhood herself. She cares for them like sons and daughters, despite her usual misanthropy.

Ivy is known to be able to seduce men and women alike, often using pheromones to do so; she is even able to use these to control Superman, although she requires kryptonite for them to work.

She specializes in hybrids and can create the most potently powerful toxins in Gotham City. Often these toxins are secreted from her lips and administered via a kiss. They come in a number of varieties, from mind-controlling drugs to instantly fatal narcotics.

In some adaptations, she can control plants with her mind, create them from plant matter of any size, mutate them into plant creatures and monsters that she can control with her mind, and have a psychic and empathic link to them. She can generate mutated plant chemicals and spores from her plants or her body, which can modify plant traits, be used to attack people, and also control the minds of humans. This mind control is sometimes being caused by fungus-like plants being generated by the plant chemicals and spores reacting to organic matter, or the mutated plant matter growing on or inside a victim of her mind control.