Wandering Around Talking To Rainbows

After watching The Suicide Squad the other week, I was reminded just how much I love Harley Quinn - I essentially took a chance on that film purely for her - and decided that she deserved her own fandom 50 post.



My first proper encounter with Batman as a kid was the 90s animated series - I was aware of the 60s Adam West series, but it was just a very silly old show I sometimes saw on Channel 4 - and I was a dedicated watcher for most of the duration of my cartoon watching era. Harley Quinn and Poison Ivy were my favourite villains - I remember being disappointed that ‘film Ivy’ didn’t get a Harley to be frenemies with - it wasn’t until actually fairly recently that I discovered that Harley was created specifically for the animated series. I didn’t read a great deal of comics until I was in my late teens - my younger cousin was a dedicated DC comics fan, so I used to read and be disappointed by his comics whenever we visited, I was more interested in my uncle’s collection, most of which was not child-safe, he was however, delighted when I came back from uni a dedicated Vertigo fan and we could argue about Alan Moore and Frank Miller and the like - by which time Harley had escaped the animated show into the wider comics universe.

As I’ve no doubt written before, until The Avengers film came out I was solidly on the DC side of the DC/Marvel divide and was - and remain - way more interested in the Batman side of things than Superman. There have been a lot of takes on the caped crusader on the big screen during my lifetime - for my money I think the Tim Burton films manage the tightrope of balancing silliness with darkness best, though I think the Christopher Nolan ones are probably better films overall - so I was more put off by the recent DCU Batman more because we’d just had a successful run of Batman films. If Ben Affleck had rocked up as Batman now I’d have been fine with it, it was just too soon after the last one, too obviously an attempt to replicate the MCU’s success, I didn’t care about the Justice League in the comics, I was unlikely to care about it on screen.

However, I will say this for the new run of films, at least they gave us Harley. I’d kind of given up on an on-screen Harley, despite her being such a fan favourite - especially among female comics fans, do you know how many roller derby players have names that are Harley references? I presume Harley playing roller derby in Birds of Prey was an affectionate hat-tip to that.

I can’t say that I’d really thought of myself as a particular fan of Harley Quinn, beyond considering her a top tier Batman villain - my high school best friend does a cracking Harley cosplay that I adore so I guess for a long time Harley was ‘her’ character in my head - until a few years ago, when I picked up a calendar in the sales that was all Batman villains and her month reminded me of my affection for her enough that one of the first pop funkos I got myself was a classic Harlequin costumed Harley - complete with domino mask and pop gun. I don’t really go in for multiple versions of characters but I played roller derby, for long enough, how could I possibly resist a roller derby Harley? Between that and the fact that I’d really enjoyed the runs of Birds of Prey that I’d actually read, I had to track down Birds of Prey when it came out, and gosh that film doesn’t half earn it’s subtitle, that is very much a film that loves Harley. (Objectively, some really terrible things have happened to Harley over the years, she is in many ways exactly who she needed to be to survive loving the Joker, and this is a film that acknowledges that and argues that she deserves better than being only that.) Harley’s an antagonist not the big bad of any story, she’s fundamentally an agent of chaos. She might be a thorn in the side of whoever is the hero of the story, but if an actually evil villain shows up, she’ll require very little persuasion to turn her skills on them.

There’s been a lot of Harley discourse over the last few years, largely due to the first Suicide Squad film - there’s a lot wrong with that film, but while it clearly wasted both Harley and Margot Robbie, I am delighted that it seems to have clued other directors into the idea that there’s actually something fun and interesting to be done with Robbie’s take on Harley - and let’s be honest there’s few things more likely to turn my interests towards a character than comics fan boy rage. So I was primed for an opportunity to renew my affection for Harley, and having loved Birds of Prey and hated the first Suicide Squad movie I decided to take advantage of the merch and dive back into the comics. (Speaking of merch, I did get a tiny bit of Suicide Squad merch, in the form of a little pop funko keyring of Harley in her goggles and flight suit from the start of the film, her costumes in that film are amazing. I didn’t always agree with what they did with her in the second - vastly better - film but they did at least seem to understand her character and use her to some actual effect.) I’ve just finished Harley Quinn: Black, White and Red - which is apparently a spin off from a Batman run in black and white - which is a bit of a mixed bag largely due to it not being a specific run by a writer working with the same couple of artists, it’s mostly standalone stories tied together by the colouring theme but actually as someone coming fresh to a character it’s a good overview of the various takes on Harley in comics over the last decade or so, a good jumping off place to explore the version of her that you like best and follow her down that rabbit hole.

That is the thing with loving Harley Quinn as a character it’s always going to be about following her down the rabbit hole, it’s just about which rabbit hole and how far you’re willing to follow her.