We’re Finally Getting the Batman Villain Team-Up We Should Have Had Ages Ago

Batman’s rogues gallery is legendary among superheroes. His villains are all bombastic, memorable, and more fleshed out than some heroes. Heck, his usual opponents, from Mister Freeze to the Joker, are popular enough to be household names. I’d imagine that a random person on the street would struggle to tell me much about Hawkman, but they would certainly know about Poison Ivy. Batman’s villains are so darn popular that they even get their own adaptations, like the Penguin TV show and the upcoming Clayface movie. The criminals who stalk Gotham’s streets can command comics all their own, and the only thing better than one of them is two of them.

Villain team-ups are always entertaining. Seeing two iconic, explosive personalities unite to bring down a shared foe is fun in a way that nothing else is. Even when the alliance is doomed from the start, those moments when they are on the same wavelength and complementing each other’s strengths are worth everything else. My personal favorite pairing is the Joker and Scarecrow’s early team-ups, but one duo we’ve not gotten in a major way is Poison Ivy and Ra’s al Ghul, which, on paper, is a downright obvious group. Well, thanks to Batman/Superman: World’s Finest #55, we’ve finally seen what these two are capable of when put together.

Deadly, Charismatic, and Environmentally Obsessed

Poison Ivy is a vindictive woman who values plants above people, and who will do anything to enforce a world order where humans can no longer harm nature. Ra’s al Ghul is a centuries-old mastermind who commands the world’s greatest legion of assassins, and who leverages his nearly unlimited resources and magical resurrection pits to enforce his vision of humanity’s future. On a surface level, you won’t see many similarities. You might even believe that these two would hate each other, and they very well may, but they also have quite a few desires that overlap. Namely, they both want to preserve the natural world and see humanity as the biggest obstacle in their way.

Poison Ivy wants to restore plant life to the dominant controllers of the world, stemming from a hatred and mistrust of most people. Ra’s doesn’t hate others, exactly, but he does see humanity as a whole as a lost cause. He fully plans to eradicate ninety percent of humanity, saying that this purge would be the only way to ensure that people could not destroy nature beyond repair. Both want to cull human society to preserve the parts of nature that they love, which is more than enough common ground. They’re also both deathly charismatic, regularly convincing others to join them through sheer allure or confidence alone. These two would make a deadly duo, and it just formed, in a sense.

The Team-Up We’ve All Been Waiting For (Kind Of)

This issue of Batman/Superman: World’s Finest saw Ra’s bust Ivy out of prison and recruit her to his team. He informed her of his plan to decimate humanity to preserve what remained of the natural world, and Ivy was fully on board. However, before this story could go all-in on a Ra’s/Ivy team-up, it revealed that this was just one piece of the larger whole. Ra’s had big plans to fully destroy civilization, and they included three other massive villains. Ocean Master, Queen Bee, and Tokamak. Together, these four would become the ecoterrorist’s Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

Poison Ivy, with her power over fauna, became the herald of famine. Ocean Master, of war, which he unleashed on Atlantis. Queen Bee represented pestilence, spreading disease with her swarms of insects. Finally, Tokamak was death, which he interpreted as destroying nuclear power plants to cause widespread devastation. This is a very interesting team, but it also buries Ivy’s role. We haven’t even seen what she’s doing as of right now, and while I have no doubt it will be entertaining, I would have loved to see just Ivy and Ra’s collaborate to destroy Batman, as he’s always been their biggest obstacle.

Ultimately, this team-up could still very well happen in the future, and I will very much await the day it finally becomes a reality. Poison Ivy and Ra’s each want such specific outcomes that are so similar but so different from each other. They are close enough to be perfect allies, but different enough to definitely want to rip each other apart by the end of this. Overall, this team of villains definitely has potential, but it’s not the team-up that I was hoping for when I saw the opening pages.

Which two Batman villains would you want to see take center stage as equals? Let us know in the comments below!

Batman/Superman: World’s Finest #55 is on sale now!

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