Harley has gone deep undercover in the punk scene, but will she fit in?
With a little help from her friends, and some swift and blinding violence, sure! Your Major Spoilers review of Harley Quinn #6 awaits!
HARLEY QUINN #6
Writer: Jimmy Palmiotto & Amanda Conner
Artist: John Timms/Jill Thompson
Colorist: Alex Sinclair/Jill Thompson
Letterer: Dave Sharpe
Editor: Chris Conroy
Publisher: DC Comics
Cover Price: $3.99
Previously in Harley Quinn: “EAT TO THIS BEAT” part two! Harley’s carving her way through the rock underground of New York City, looking for the brutal criminals who hurt someone she cared about…unfortunately for Harley, one of the crooks in question has fallen in mad love with her.
I GET WHAT THEY’RE GOING FOR…
We open with Harley and her band (The Skull Bags, each of whom has their own gimmick and some SERIOUSLY distracting word balloon idiosyncrasies) preparing for their first show. The only problem is, they’re not really any good, or even particularly musical. Harley makes up for their flaws by enhancing the performance, first pulling a random bystander up on-stage and MURDERING HIM (or at least implying such, as he was actually a willing volunteer who really wanted to be beaten up by a girl) and then follows up by throwing animal feces at the crowd. They love her act, to the point where Harley is invited out by some of the other performers, allowing her to sneak a peek into the subculture, all the better to find the people who hurt her friend. This is interspersed with flashbacks to her days as a doctor at Arkham, specifically some of the earliest interactions with The Joker, including the moment where he made her a little soap heart to declare his love for her…
…BUT I’M NOT FEELIN’ IT
Everything in this issue happens for a reason, but the overall package is just… not hitting the right notes. The transition from Jill Thompson’s flashback art to John Timms punk-rock present seems jarring by design, but the transition ends up being too difficult to pull of, while Harley’s antics are a little… I suppose the only word is “gross,” which probably reveals that I’m no longer an angry young punk ready to buck the system, blah blah blah fishcakes. The strengths of the issue come in the character work (including one who seems to be the son of legendary terrible villain Egg Fu), and even though I don’t like the juxtaposition of the two wildly divergent art styles, both are solid. Timms work is perfectly suited to this punk-rock aesthetic, as well, which makes for some great visuals throughout the issue.
THE BOTTOM LINE: OFF-PUTTING ON MULTIPLE LEVELS
In short, this one does a lot of things well, but still misses the mark as a whole, especially since I was a little bit lost throughout even after reading last issue’s part one. Still, Harley Quinn #6 isn’t a bad comic, just one that doesn’t pivot as skillfully between its various moments as I’d have liked it to, earning a still-better-than-average 2.5 out of 5 stars overall. If nothing else, it’s intriguing enough to make me want to come back and see if the arc ends up pulling all the loose ends together successfully…
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Once upon a time, there was a young nerd from the Midwest, who loved Matter-Eater Lad and the McKenzie Brothers... If pop culture were a maze, Matthew would be the Minotaur at its center. Were it a mall, he'd be the Food Court. Were it a parking lot, he’d be the distant Cart Corral where the weird kids gather to smoke, but that’s not important right now... Matthew enjoys body surfing (so long as the bodies are fresh), writing in the third person, and dark-eyed women. Amongst his weaponry are such diverse elements as: Fear! Surprise! Ruthless efficiency! An almost fanatical devotion to pop culture! And a nice red uniform.
1 Comment
I find the current Harley to be a little… repulsive as a character, if I may say so. I get everyone seems to be in love with her and embraces her as some sort of liberation/empowerment figure (something that I think is undermined by bringing the Joker or his shadow up every other issue), but I find the ‘Draco in Leather Pants’ treatment she gets, where she can be basically as annoying, careless, outright abusive of others and still face no lasting consequences because she’s a woman and ‘hot’ and because of her sob story with Hate Sink the Joker somewhat unsettling. Even Deadpool, whom DC seems to have used as so much of a blueprint for their current take on Harley, has far more actual depth and development to her.
Harley has become pretty much an untouchable sacred cow (no pun or mysoginistic insult intended, I’d use the same term if she happened to be a male) by virtue of what DC and her fans have sold her as, rather than what she actually is, in my humble opinion. Catwoman did a fare more graceful and sensible evolution from villainess obsessed with a man to mostly independent, strong heroic female with a darker edge.