Remember the #0 issue where a ton of artists contributed pages for Harley’s sugar-induced hallucinations? Apparently that’s now the format of the series! Amanda Conner and Jimmy Palmiotti write Harley waaaayy out of character and have fashioned her into a do-gooder type who’s created a mob of Harley-ettes who fight crime. That’s the feeble “story” of this nearly 200 page book!
Conner/Palmiotti really don’t know what to do with Harley. She’s a psychiatrist, she’s a landlord, she’s a roller derby gal, she’s chasing romance with Ivy and then some new buff guy, she’s running a small zoo, she’s a burgeoning superhero; I’m not sure why they’ve got her spinning so many plates except to say they’re hoping that all this stuff will somehow amount to something (it doesn’t).
Worse though is the tedious storytelling. One overlong sequence has Harley try to bust out Ivy from Arkham so she decides to hijack a small plane and parachute from it into the asylum. After several pages setting this up, she fails, parachutes onto a table of pizza and chows down. She ends up driving a car into Arkham’s gates and gets in that way. I think that was supposed to have us in stitches but it’s so, so unfunny and utterly pointless. After some unnecessary dream sequences, we discover that it was all to add an annoying new character to the mix, a talking egg called Edgar with robot tentacles (really!).
That drivel is indicative of this book as a whole. One story has Harley give away puppies, then visit the house of a family who has her favourite puppy and stick around to fix that family or some ridiculous crap. Another one has Harley try to literally kill time because she’s found a grey hair, so she goes after an elderly geezer called Thyme. Oh, my sides.
Bruce Wayne is auctioned off for charity and goes on a date with Harley. More dream sequences follow. Are we supposed to be laughing? Entertained? This is desperate, throwaway horseshit that’s just super annoying.
The man chasing, the bad comedy, the cutesiness – it’s like an endless Ally McBeal episode! There’s more but I’ll stop here, pop some aspirin and think of other things. Like Harley, this series is a hot mess.
Harley Quinn, Volume 3: Kiss Kiss Bang Stab
Harley isn't Harley anymore. Honestly though, Paul Dini is the only person who knows how to write the character correctly. Everybody else completely fails.
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