Harleen #3
This was a great ending to what has been a great miniseries.
I make no secret of being a fan of Sejic before I read this, but even then I wasn’t convinced he could pull this off. Harley is a character that has often felt a bit thin to me, and with no real attachment to her I wondered whether he could really make me care about her and make her seem like a fully-formed character.
I shouldn’t have worried. This is some of the best character work I’ve seen recently in a Big Two superhero comic, and it helps that Sejic has had the time to really dig into Harleen’s pre-Harley character and set up a lot of payoffs that finally come this issue. It feels earned (rather than like it’s happening just because it has to in order to get Harley to where she needs to be.)
The romance angle works too, as weird as that sounds. We see the Joker as Harley sees him, and it’s fascinating and disturbing to see him become such an object of erotic desire (and there’s some pleasing ambiguity about exactly how much he’s manipulating it all).
On top of all this there’s a big jailbreak storyline that pulls in lots of other Bat-villains, as well as some nice cameos from Bruce Wayne himself that offer a slightly different perspective on everything that’s going on.
This book works, basically, and I look forward to rereading it all in one go.
I gather Sejic is working on a follow-up about Poison Ivy (who plays a supporting role here). I’ll definitely be there for that.
I also found the time to read #3 this weekend. I have to re-read all 3 issues soon again, since I got a bit lost in #2 with the Two-Face story within the story, that gets its payback here (I think he is also a character that gets a new angle that works better for me here than before – the Judge makes the way he “thinks”/”operates” make more sense of the character than ever).
Returning to Harley, it was one of the best interpretations I’ve read of the character and it makes me like her a lot more now.
The only negative for me, and this is not Harleen’s fault, is the continued “Deus Ex Machina” that is given to the Joker character. It’s like he’s this master manipulator and has everything set in advance. From comic to comic, it makes me like that kind of characterization of his character less and less. It makes him like Batman, and I also don’t like that “prepared in advance” set for those two characters.
People are always telling me Batman is more realistic than Superman, since Batman is the apogee of human development. But the more I read Batman or in this case Joker’s characterizations, the more it reads the opposite. Batman/Joker are a non-realistic fantasy. It’s like they are both future-tellers, they could win the lottery every week. In this story the Joker sets all the domino stones in place “in advance?” and Harley falls for it…
Sorry for the rant, but Batman is losing is human connection more and more, and the Joker is looking more and more like a cold manipulator than an chaos agent…