Harley Quinn #28 – Tini Howard, Writer; Sweeney Boo, Artist Erica Henderson, Backup Writer/Artist
Ray – 7.5/10
Ray: It’s time for a new Harley Quinn run, and that means it’s time for a character reset. Harley doesn’t usually get it as distinctly as Wonder Woman, who sheds her entire supporting cast with each run, but each Harley writer has had a distinctly unique take. Especially after Stephanie Phillips’ run, which took Harley through a pretty extensive personal journey, there’s a high bar to meet—and after the first half of this oversized issue, I was not feeling it at all. Harley seems to be spiraling, taking self-destructive actions while Ivy is out of town. She’s back to crime, getting into a weird battle of wills with Two-Face, and even seems to be ignoring and disregarding Kevin as he tries to stage an intervention.
Then the issue takes a strange turn as Harley gets arrested and winds up before a hard-nosed judge who is about to send her to jail—until he changes his mind and tasks her with community service teaching psychology at Gotham Community college. This has a lot more promise, with Harley seeming to take the lead role in the sitcom AP Bio. But as a Two-Face attack disrupts class, Harley notices weird things around her – and at the end of the issue, the story takes a strange multiversal twist. This issue is much more ambitious than Howard’s usual crime-influenced Gotham stories, and that’s both a positive and a negative. This is a big, crazy, messy issue and while I’m not 100% sold yet, I am intrigued.
Next we come to the strange Erica Henderson backup, which casts Harley in the role of a magical girl while she’s still working at Arkham. There’s no internal logic to this—she has a secret identity, but is also close with the Sirens who serve as her backup magical girls. But then, it’s not really supposed to make sense. It’s just another crazy take on Harley in the multiverse, backed up by her girls as they take on the weirdest version of Bruce Wayne out there. This manga-inspired story is easily the best part of the issue, as random as it is.
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GeekDad received this comic for review purposes.
