…in the end, I gravitated to the one person who actually seemed to need me…
Keep reading for a review of Harleen #3.
Heads up for some spoilers below.
Part of this issue finishes up Harvey Dent’s journey to become Two-Face, and the reasons behind it. (Other than having half his face melted off.)
Harvey hates that the prison system in Gotham is so broken, that criminals continually get out and wreak havoc on innocents and there’s no ultimate punishment. So his plan is…to stage a massive break out and let the criminals wreak havoc on innocents until the politicians have to act.
That’s pretty convoluted, but half the man’s face is melted off, straightforward logic isn’t going to be his strong suit.
I like how Stjepan explained that Two-Face’s coin isn’t just a sociopath’s way of deciding on life or death, it’s because he knows he’s been hallucinating; if you can’t trust reality, you might as well make your decisions based on a coin flip.
Speaking of clever explanations, Joker’s reasons for needing his interactions…intense…is a really interesting one. I don’t know if I’ve ever heard of him having full-body nerve damage from falling into the vat of acid, but that makes a lot of sense.
One of my main problems with the Harleen-turning-to-Harley stories in the past was the speed at which it happened. Stjepan is being careful to spend months on this transformation. It’s very much the frog-in-slowly-boiling water situation: Harleen doesn’t go straight from scientist to henchman, there’s a lot of steps in between. Some of those steps involve her fantasizing about digging her nails into Mr. Jay’s skin, but it took a while to get there.
Throughout the whole issue, she is still convinced that getting closer to the Joker is how she’s going to help him become sane. She’s not stupid, she knows she’s obsessed with him, but most of the time she justifies it by how much good she can do. (The rest of the time she doesn’t bother to justify it, she’s enjoying herself too much to care.)
And the Joker is enjoying it too, I think that’s undeniable. Sure, he demonstrates how easily he could drop the “relationship” if he wanted to, as well as how little Harleen’s “help” is actually helping him. But he’s not faking how attracted he is to her. That’s much more interesting than the idea that he’s leading her on just to get out of Arkham.
Speaking of Arkham, the massive breakout was wonderfully nightmarish. I love it when an artist and a writer can bring out the worst in Batman’s classic villains (they can become cartoonish sometimes) and here we got to see exactly how terrifying Killer Croc can be.
And I really liked how Batman exists on the edge of this series. We couldn’t have the story without him, but it’s not his story. And his interaction with Alfred at the end was very insightful. Of course Batman would leap to the conclusion that Harleen was naive and only wanting to help, and the Joker was only toying with her to get what he wanted. Alfred, not nearly so jaded, points out that it’s usually more complicated than that. And he’s right. Harleen had selfish reasons for doing what she did too, and the Joker could’ve killed her many times over if he didn’t feel anything for her.
We get a glimpse of Harley many years in the future, where she’s closer to the Harley Quinn we know. She’s not well, obviously, and we don’t get a lot of details. Harleen’s theory was “people in prolonged stressful situations might permanently lose the ability to feel empathy.” In her case, what if it was the opposite? What if after all she’s done she still never lost her empathy, and that’s what drove her mad?
But if you’ve read Stjepan’s fan art that inspired this series (spoilers) we don’t get the interactions with Poison Ivy that he showed there, where she asks Harley why she stays with the Joker. That happens much later in Harley’s story, and this series comes to an end long before that. But Stjepan laid the groundwork for that conversation though, and possibly for a future closeness between Ivy and Harley.
And the art? I can’t say anything about Stjepan’s art that I haven’t said many times. It’s beautiful, both the line work and the colors. And in particular there is one absolutely glorious image of Poison Ivy. Stjepan’s said before that he likes painting redheads, and you can tell he had the best time making that one, it’s jawdroppingly good.
The one problem I had with the series was that I didn’t want it to end, so I’m hoping these three issues are enough to convince everybody involved that we need a whole lot more.
