Harley Quinn #29 – Tini Howard, Writer; Sweeney Boo, Artist; Adam Warren, Backup Writer/Artist; Alejandro Sanchez, Backup Colorist
Ray – 8/10
Ray: This new run on Harley Quinn has wasted no time taking a turn for the bizarre, which I suppose works very nicely for Harley. After all, she’s quickly become the DCU’s top place to go for surreal, meta antics. When Tini Howard was announced to be taking over the book, I was worried she’d go for a more down-to-earth take to sync the book up with her Catwoman run and set up a Sirens reunion. She’s done anything but, as the first issue alone saw Harley get arrested for a Looney Tunes-esque feud with Two-Face, get sentenced to probation teaching psychology to college students, and somehow piss off some multiversal police officers and get threatened with extermination. Yeah, that last one sort of sticks out.
This isn’t the first time Harley has pissed off the multiverse, with both Stephanie Phillips and Sam Humphries dealing with it extensively. With a multiversal bounty on her head, Harley seeks out Zatanna for help (interrupting a dalliance with Constantine, which Zatanna solves in a hilarious way) and is told she can enter the multiverse through a spell—but needs to make a sacrifice first. This leads to a serious of bizarre moral dilemmas from Harley, and even a heart-to-heart with Batman, but the series takes an even stranger twist towards the end when we meet the new form that Harley’s multiversal guides are taking. It’s a weird story, maybe too weird, but Sweeney Boo’s art somehow perfectly sells it.
Adam Warren takes over for the backup, which involves Harley hallucinating that her pet hyenas Bud and Lou are actually able to talk—and they proceed to take her on a weird meta trip around the DCU. What if the hyenas were actually cosmic beings? What if they were dark gods? What if they were all products of Harley’s imagination? What if she was a product of THEIR imagination? It’s a one-joke story, but one that sells itself based on the bizarre visuals and just how far into the absurd it takes the plot.
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GeekDad received this comic for review purposes.
