I've seen some complaints about the previous run on Harley Quinn, with people not being one hundred percent happy on the direction the character was taken. Harley making the leap from villain to anti-hero was always going to be one that would divide fans; some would like the shift and evolution of the character, whilst others would disagree with it completely. I, personally, liked seeing the changes that she went through, and the ways in which she tried to make amends for her past and do some good in Gotham. Whether it was her going undercover at Arkham Tower in Detective Comics, or her teaming up with Batwoman on occasion in her own title, it was cool to see her trying to be better.
A lot of that seems to have been dropped with issue twenty eight, the start of a new run under writer Tini Howard. The issue opens with Harley battling with Two-Face, not because he's a criminal and she's kind of a vigilante now, but because she thinks it'll be fun to annoy him and make him angry. This feels like the first bit of character regression for me, as Harley now seems less concerned with doing good and more focused on having fun. The previous twenty seven issues showed Harley learning some hard lessons about the kind of person she wants to be, and how she fits into the world, and they feel kind of forgotten now.
This continues across the rest of the issue as Harley settles into her new life staying in Poison Ivy's apartment with her two hyenas as Ivy is off doing stuff for her own book. Gone is Harley's ferry home, her alien parasite pet, and Kevin, as she's dropped all of that to talk to herself in an empty apartment. Once again, this feels like a big step backwards for her, and like Howard simply wished to ditch everything from the previous issues and give Harley a fresh starting point simply because they could. This goes even further when Kevin does make an appearance in the book, acting nothing like the character that we got to know, and even goes on to betray Harley by selling her out to the police so that she can receive some kind of punishment in order to teach her a lesson. I know Kevin isn't exactly a long standing or beloved character, but this feels so out of character for him it might as well be character assassination.
And so Harley gets taken to court to receive punishment for all of the crimes she's been doing. But don't worry, she's not going to be joining Catwoman in prison, because the judge likes the fact that she has a girlfriend (don't worry, Harley will hammer that point home repeatedly across the book, complete with puns, innuendo, and sex jokes) and so sentences Harley to community service, teaching at the local community college. And so Harley is off to teach psychology at the local community college as punishment like she's off to Greendale in what feels like a really weird and contrived explanation for why she's now a teacher.
She's barely into her first day teaching when Two-Face smashes his car into the room in order to come after Harley again. This is the third time that he's come up in the book, and the third time that he's made out to be a complete fool. He can't not too different from Harley, beaten the first time because he loses his shoe and stops the fight to go look for it, and this time he smashes his expensive car through a wall, but then yells at Harley for touching it because she could damage it. He's been changed from a threatening, dangerous criminal into a cartoon.
Speaking of cartoons, Harley manages to beat him in the fight by picking up a big cartoon fish and slapping him with it. Initially thinking that she's simply imagining it, she's shocked when others see the big smiling fish. What could it all mean? Well, we get an absolutely ridiculous explanation for this as Lady Quark appears, taking the fish back. She tells Harley that she basically pulled the giant fish out of another reality in the multiverse, and caused damage to the multiverse because of it. She warns Harley that if she messes with the multiverse again she'll come back and deal with Harley.
So, I honestly kind of hate this. Harley Quinn just did a story dealing with the multiverse, there's also a mini-series called Harley Quinn Screws Up The Multiverse going on right now, and now she's able to pull objects out of other realities. Why has Harley become a multiverse character all of a sudden? If this is somehow fallout from the previous story it'll feel a bit cheap, but at least it would work, but if not and this is something else it feels like a terrible direction to take a street-level anti-hero. I also have a suspicion they might try and explain away her craziness and all of the weird stuff she sees and does as somehow being connected to her seeing other realities, or pulling things from them.
This is the first issue of a new run, and so far it's the worst of this title. Everything feels horribly disjointed and badly connected together, none of the characters seem to act in character, little makes much sense, the humour is pretty bad and borders on annoying. The previous writer seemed to have found a decent way of writing Harley where sometimes it didn't quite work, but at least it felt like Harley in the wider DC Universe. This feels like it's taking place in a cartoon pastiche of DC to the point where if the multiverse stuff ends up revealing this isn't the mainline universe I'd believe it, because it doesn't feel like it fits at all.
The art on the issue similarly feels very cartoonish, and Erica Henderson art is nice, but it ends up adding to the feeling like this book just doesn't fit into the wider universe. Everything is big, bright, and pretty to look at, and there are some moments where the art really sells the idea that Harley isn't stable, but there are also some moments where the expressions on Harley's face look a little too inhuman to be completely comfortable.
I'd come to enjoy Harley Quinn as a fun book that didn't take itself too seriously, could have some fun, and occasionally did some cool stuff, but it's very quickly dropped to a title that I really didn't enjoy. I'm hoping that this might be first issue jitters, that things change as the series goes on; or it could just be that this new era of Harley just isn't for me.
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