I’ve always liked Harley Quinn as a character and when recently looking for a comic to read during a flight, I spotted this on the shelf and thought that it would be the perfect choice. If you don’t know anything about Harley or Batman comics at large, you don’t need to worry at all – although it takes the basic ideas behind certain characters, it’s largely a completely original storyline that has no real connections to past iterations of Gotham City.
Here you’ve got a teenage Harley who is being raised by a single drag queen father who goes by the name Mama. Harley is a weird girl and something of a perpetual outcast, and though her grasps of right and wrong don’t seem very well-defined, you feel for her as a dumb kid who’s just trying to find her way – and I’m sure we can all remember a time when our young teenage selves had slightly wonky values.
You get to see her making friends with a young Poison Ivy – though this is very much a story that is rooted in reality, and in this version of events Ivy is just another girl in the school who is into environmental activism. Harley immediately latches onto her and thinks she’s really cool, though the two of them occasionally clash because of Harley’s less keenly developed sense of morality.
It’s a story of our times, dealing with wealth inequality and the disregard for ordinary working class people that is often displayed by rich property owners. It illustrates how someone like Harley, who is not particularly motivated by social causes, could end up being forced onto a side in a “political” debate, just by existing.
Also, I particularly liked how this graphic novel handled The Joker. At fist, I really didn’t want him to be in it, as I didn’t want him over-shadowing Harley and Ivy, but in the end I was very pleased with how he was portrayed. I don’t want to spoil anything, but it felt like he was intentionally written to highlight that it is really not a good idea to put the character on a pedestal and celebrate him as someone who challenges the hypocrisy of society, illustrating that his attitudes just reinforce the status quo in harmful ways.
I thought it was a really beautiful story, and although it seemed to end a little abruptly, I enjoyed every second that I spent in its world. I loved the positive focus on drag queens and the way that so many of he characters felt so real. It was gritty and it was engaging, and the art by Steve Pugh helps make it even more beautiful. I strongly recommend it to anyone, whether you’re a DC fan or not.
Rating: 9.6/10
