On Harley Quinn 25th Anniversary Special #1

If you're struggling with the math--or, like me, marveling at how fast time seems to pass once you reach 40--it should perhaps be noted that DC Comics is celebrating the 25 years that have passed since Harley Quinn's first appearance on Batman: The Animated Series in 1992. She wouldn't actually debut in comics until 1993, in an issue of cartoon tie-in comic Batman Adventures, and she wouldn't join the DC Comics Universe proper until 1999's Batman: Harley Quinn special. Perhaps because of the character's non-standard path--originating in a cartoon adaptation of the comics, then gradually working her way into the comics--it's appropriate that the Harley Quinn 25th Anniversary Special tackles various versions of the character.

I'm actually a little surprised at how slim a package it is though, given the character's seemingly exponentially growing popularity. It's just a $4.99 floppy, with four short stories totaling 32 story pages and six pin-ups. In terms of size and number of high-profile contributors, it's not much bigger than any of the many Harley Quinn one-shots and special issues DC put out when it was clear that they had a hit on their hands with the post-Flashpoint, second volume of Harley Quinn (Because DC relaunched all their titles during their "Rebirth" initiative, however, we are now on our third volume of a Harley Quinn ongoing series, although the creators and direction have remained the seam between the second and the third).

Of those pin-ups, my favorite is definitely the one contributed by Babs Tarr, who draws her own hybrid Harley with her old Gotham City Sirens co-stars Catwoman and Poison Ivy.

Tarr's an amazing talent, and particularly good at drawing sexy ladies. The issue is almost worth five bucks for her pin-up alone. The others are by Annie Wu (whose image prominently features Harley's pet hyenas, engaged in helping her wreck a psychiatrist's office), Bengal, Dustin Nguyen and Greg Tocchini, Kamome Shirahama (Looking at these reminded me of the old Gallery one-shots that DC used to publish, but have long since abandoned; I imagine with the price of comics now being what it is, it would be harder to make those seem like they were worth whatever the publisher sold them for, but I used to really enjoy seeing so many different artists' takes on particular characters in 1992's The Batman Gallery, 1994's The Sandman: A Gallery of Dreams and A Death Gallery, 1997's JLA Gallery and so forth).

The first of the four stories is set firmly in current continuity, and is by the regular Harley Quinn writers Amanda Conner and Jimmy Palmiotti, with Conner also drawing it, something that happens far too infrequently (although, truth be told, the Harley Quinn monthly and its spin-offs have all generally had pretty good art, certainly better than that of your average DC Comic).

I had a hard time getting through this story, having skipped it the first time through the book and having to try two more times before I read it. As much as I like Conner's art, when it comes to Conmiotti's Harley comics, I am not a fan. This one has their character Red Tool--pronounce it "Deadpool," but with an "R" instead of a "D"--right there in the first panel, and when I see him my eyes roll so hard it makes reading comics somewhat difficult for a while afterwards. He is in a two-page framing sequence with Harley, between which is a "lost scene" from their 2015 Harley Quinn Road Trip Special co-starring Poison Ivy and Catwoman, probably most notable for all the great artists who contributed to it (like Moritat and the too-rarely-seen-at-DC-these-days Bret Blevins and Mike Manley).

Killing time before killing some dudes, Harley tells Deadpool Red Tool about how Vegas casino owner Yosemite Sam offered the three of them an ell-expenses paid stay in one of his hotels, and they got thrown out of it.

Harley's co-creator Paul Dini scripts the next story, "Birthday Blues," which seems to be set in The Animated Series continuity, or at least adjacent to it. Rather than being paired with Bruce Timm, the noticeably absent other creator of the character, Dini is working with regular Harley Quinn artist Chad Hardin. It's a pretty fun little story with the meta angle of Harley celebrating her 25th birthday, and how The Joker and Poison Ivy are involved in said celebration. There's a twist within a twist at the end, and as short as it is, those twists serve to pretty perfectly define all three characters and their relationships.

As great as it would have been to see Timm or someone who worked on Batman Adventures draw this, it was actually really interesting to see Hardin drawing the costumes from the TV cartoon, adapting the designs into his own style, which is very different than that of Timm (And, if you've spent as many hours of your life as I have on that show, it's fun picking out which designs from which season Hardin chooses, and to what extent; his Catwoman, for example, is wearing a costume that looks like a compromise between that of the first season and her more recent Darwyn Cooke-designed comic book cat suit. The Joker has the hairstyle and pointy-nose of TAS's redesigned Joker, but not the weird eyes; Killer Croc looks as he did on the cartoon, but with spikes. And so on.)

The most surprising stories are the two that follow. The first of these is by writer Daniel Kibblesmith and artist David Lafuente (a great artist who I really wish I could see more of, preferably on a regular, ongoing basis). Entitled "Harley Quinn & Friends In...Somewhere That's Green!", it is perhaps a little too timely in its reference to a deadly hurricane bearing down on the city (New York here, not Gotham).

Gal pals Harley and Ivy are in a grocery store to get supplies, when Swamp Thing grows out of the produce stand. He needs Ivy's help because of her connection to The Green, and Harley basically invites herself along. The Swamp Thing/Harley Quinn rapport was interesting enough that I kind of wish DC hadn't cancelled Harley's Little Black Book, as I wonder if it was fun watching those two interact because the short space here meant Kibblesmith could squeeze in all the potential good bits, or if the characters really could have the chemistry to carry a whole over-sized comic story.

If nothing else, Kibblesmith gets Swamp Thing in a raincoat and rain hat for a few panels; that's awesome.

As I mentioned, I really liked Lafuente's art, but it was especially good in this story, which had enough of a comedic tone that he could fill the backgrounds with loose, cartoony, caricature-like drawings, and go pretty wild with Swamp Thing. (Colorist John Rauch deserves some props here too, particuarly given his way with Harley's hair.

The final story was probably my favorite, and it came from the unlikely team of writer Chip Zdarsky and artist Joe Quinones, who are more Marvel guys than DC guys at this point (much to DC's detriment, if you ask me!). Entitled "Bird Psychology," this is the first story in the book to involve Batman, and, of course, Robin.

It's set somewhere...unclear-ish. Harley's look here is unique to this story, not lining up with that of TAS, The New 52, or the Margot Robie-in-Suicide Squad inspired "Rebirth" redesign. There's a Robin heavily involved, but the costume doesn't really give us any clues; it looks closer to Tim Drake's original than any other design, but then, the TAS Dick Grayson's suit looked a lot like Tim's comics costume, and the post-Flashpoint Dick also wore a more Tim-like costume...this one has some of the weird elements of Dick's New 52 Robin get-up but, like Harley's costume, is unique to this story (Based on the dialogue, in which Harley intuits that he's an orphan, it is probably meant to be Dick). The Joker and Batman both look like their TAS selves or their post-Crisis, pre-Flashpoint selves, but neither of them is too terribly easy placed in any particular milieu by their duds alone. All that said, the red skies, the black buildings and the particular designs and costuming of Commissioner Gordon, Harvey Bullock and Renee Montoya all definitely suggest that this is supposed to be a Quinones-ized TAS story.

This is, in broad strokes, a Batman and Robin vs. The Joker and Harley Quinn story, in which the superhero and his archvillain do battle, assigning their sidekick and moll to fight. The Joker underestimates Harley as per usual, and she ends up choosing to do good and play hero on the sly, because as crazy a bad girl as she might be, she's not, like, evil. Harley, and, to a lesser extent, Robin, are the focus of the story.

As well constructed as Zdarsky's plot is, it was the little elements that I really dug; he does a fine job of making The Joker seem like a completely insane criminal without having to, like, dwell on his homicidal tendencies. The story just cuts from The Joker at his work bench, plotting, to his plot already in progress, where Batman and Robin are fighting goons in adult pajamas, The Joker is wearing an old timey night shirt and night cap with sheep oven mitts on his hands, and there's a giant, angry Batman Tsum Tsum with a mouth full of striped missiles...? The creators do a pretty good job of nailing '90s Joker, particularly TAS-style Joker, where he could be menacing, scary and completely insane, without also having to be, like, Freddy Krueger or whatever.

Quinones is a fine artist, and this particular script allows him to pack in all sorts of great details; every available space of The Joker's hideout has an Easter Egg to some previous Joker story from some previous medium in it.

So while I didn't love all of this, the good in it definitely outweighed the bad, and it's certainly a reliable purchase for the casual Harley Quinn fan.

Review: Batman: Arkham City

I was pretty disappointed with this trade paperback, which collects both the five-issue 2011 miniseries of the title by longtime, cross-media Batman writer Paul Dini and video game designer Carlos D'Anda and five shot stories referred to as "Batman: Arkham City Digital Chapters." The latter are very short stories focusing on particular characters from the comic and/or the Arkham video games, and created by a variety of writers and artists (They appear to be written by some combination of Dini and Fridolfs, and drawn by a half-dozen artists, of whose work Dustin Nguyen and Ted Naifeh's are the most easily recognizable).

I was more disappointed with it than I tend to be with other mediocre Batman comics, however, because this is a comic book series I specifically wanted to read (or at least very close to it), and the sort of series I know I've asked for publicly and repeatedly before it was ever announced.

As many of you know, I love comics and I love Batman, but I am not the least bit into video games, and stopped playing them sometime around high school. To get all Old Man on you for a second, I think they are a tremendous waste of time, at least for me; even if I had access to a gaming system and a game, I can't imagine sitting there and playing any for very long, as I'd feel too guilty about the time I was wasting when I could be doing something more productive (Although, this is my idea of productive, so seriously, don't mind me; I'm not casting aspersions on gamers, simply relating how I personally feel about me personally playing video games).

But! That Arkham Asylum video game sure was popular, I know, based on all the damn articles all the damn comics news sites have written about it. And, skimming those articles, the game sure seemed to have a pretty unique design aesthetic for Batman and his entire rogue's gallery, looking an awful lot like a live-action Hollywood Batman movie on which the guys who design MacFarlane toys served as costume designers and art directors. I kinda wanted to see how they designed their Scarecrow and Penguin and Bane and Mad Hatter and so on, and how they played those characters, all of whom have been designed and redesigned so very many times over the years.

So, I thought, it would be cool if DC published a comic book adaptation of the game, presenting the game's story (I assumed there was a pretty involved story to it, right?), using those designs, for curious Luddites like me...and, given how goddam popular the game was, it seemed like it would be a good business move for DC. If millions of folks are buying and playing the game, and you're publishing somewhere between six and fifteen Batman comics every month anyway, why not make one of them especially to appeal to the folks playing that game...?

This is the comic book they came up with. As the blurb on the trade paperback cover says, it's "The lead-in to the BEST-SELLING VIDEO GAME", released between Arkham Asylum and its sequel game Arkham City, and meant to serve as a bridge between the two.

And it's not very good. It's competent, sure, but rather than adapt a story from either game, its attempt to "bridge" them both means it's continuing a story from one game (which I'm completely unfamiliar with, although it seems to have had an incredibly ridiculous ending) and foreshadowing the story of another game, which I'm also completely unfamiliar with (and asks for a pretty big suspension of disbelief commitment, even for fans of Batman comics), and, at the time of release in serial format, everyone would have been completely unfamiliar with.

The story is this: After the events of the game Batman: Arkham Asylum, The Joker is in a wheelchair and facing a chronic disease as a result of his using a super-drug called Titan, which seems to be a lot like Bane's Venom (it turned The Joker into a Hulk-like version of himself in the flashback's). His girlfriend, Harley Quinn, breaks him out of jail just as he and the rest of the Arkham inmates are about to be transferred.

Where are they being transferred? Well, the new Gotham City Mayor is the former warden of Arkham, who has been elevated to the status of hero after whatever went down there (I'm assuming Batman was the real hero of the Arkham incident, so if Gotham would have made him mayor, I assume the need for a sequel game could have been avoided—or else the game would have been very, very different, as players guided Mayor Batman through various meetings and ribbon cutting ceremonies).

He is being controlled via hypnosis through a mysterious figure (who is only mysterious if you've never read a Batman comic or seen a Batman cartoon), into endorsing the craziest, dumbest plan ever: Transforming half of Gotham City into a sort of open-air asylum/prison/free-range supervillain zoo called "Arkham City."

From what we see here, it appears to be an adaptation of the storyline from "No Man's Land," customized into a video game-ready format. I honestly didn't quite get it, as the scenes set in the newly opened Arkham City show us that prison guards will work inside the city, so...I don't know. It doesn't make a lot of sense, logistics-wise, which is probably fine for a video game and/or the telling of a story set in that setting, but since the premise of this series/story is how Gotham City goes from Point A (a maximum security prison/asylum where they store there super-villain mass murderers) to Point B (a city where the super-villain mass murders can start their own society), selling the premise would seem to be a priority.

Instead, the issues are devoted to slowly revealing the Big Bad behind the mayor, a plot involving a terrorist attack conducted by two suicidal Titan-abusers to convince the public of Gotham that super-crime is still a pretty big problem, and moving Batman, The Joker, Harley Quinn, The Penguin and a few other characters into place for the start of the game.

D'Anda's artwork is fine, and while he's drawing the game's versions of the characters, his style is very comic book-y, and doesn't seem to be aping the aesthetic of the game at all. It looks pretty much like your standard-issue issue of a Batman comic, and the characters and their costumes aren't vary too terribly different than their DCU versions...at least, not the majority of the characters who appear for much length of time within this comic (I suppose that is due in large part to the fact that DC Comics hasn't really had standard designs for any characters for a long time; every Bat-villain can and often does look completely different in every appearance, depending on how the artists involved choose to draw them).

Of the characters appearing here, most look just like their comic book counterparts. The Batman of the games seems to be very heavily armored and to look closer to one of the movie Batmen then the comic book's Batman, but D'Anda draws him with white triangle eyes and a swathe of black cape that covers his seam-filled armored costume. Catwoman looks like comic book Catwoman, save for her gigantic breasts and the fact that her costume is unzipped to display them. The Joker, Penguin, Riddler, Two-Face and Poison Ivy all look like themsevles, with minor variances (The Penguin doesn't have a long, beak-like nose, Ivy has some kind of green henna-looking skin formation on her legs, etc).

Of the villains Mr. Zsasz, who appears only briefly, seems to be the most radically reinvented, shown shaved bald and with fewer, more realistic looking hash-mark scars, and, of course, Harley Quinn, who has ditched her costume and clown make-up, and basically just looks like a blond lady with a lot of eye-liner wearing red and black clothes.

Visually, the most thoroughly reinvented of all of the characters is Robin, who most closely resembles the Chris O'Donnel version from the Joel Schumacher Batman films, albeit with a cooler costume. It's not clear who he is—I think he's meant to be Dick Grayson—but he's clearly pretty old and pretty big, being about the same size and shape as Batman himself.

The part of the book I actually ended up enjoying the most was the 13-page concept art section by D'Anda and Brandon Badeaux, which featured their attempts to redesign characters for the game. In addition to Joker, Harley, The Riddler and Two-Face, who appear in the comic, there are a few pages of sketches also devoted to Mister Freeze, Solomon Grundy and Talia al Ghul, who do not.

They aren't simply finished sketches, but show different choices or directions that they could go in, and so we get to see, for example, seven different Talias with different hair styles and costumes (all extremely revealing, with all showing off her breasts and half revealing her belly, and all looking like very tight versions of something you might be able to buy off the rack at places that sells stripper clothes and motorcycle gear), or four versions of Harley, again, all of which are extremely revealing, and, here all of which are based on fetish-gear. One of 'em has a version of her regular mask, one has a bondage mask, the others are mask-less. All have corsets and garter straps, and piercings or tattoos or both. Two of them feature her wearing the sort of novelty furry handcuffs you'd find at a sex shop.

It's kinda weird really, and while I don't know what version of her appears in the Arkham City game, these are notably for reimagining her as such an overtly sexualized character; not as in "drawn sexy" or "meant to be there for cheesecake value," but as in she is wearing the sort of gear you would find at a fetish or Rubber Ball, from head to toe.

Badeaux' Solomon Grundy and Two-Face are the most intriguing sketches. Beadeaux's Grundy seems to take cues from Dough Mahnke's design of the Frankenstein who appeared in the Grant Morrison-written Seven Soldier's, with a ragged Victorian coat and stitching; he's also very zombified looking, with musculature peeking out of ripped-off patches of skin.

The Two-Face almost all look cooler than the one that appears in the preceding comic; one features the "bad" side of him dressed in clothes that look as burned as his face, with his pant leg and suit-sleeve partially burned off, as if the left half of his suite was doused with fire or acid just like his face. In two of the sketches, Two-Face seems to be trying to hide or at least obscure his scars; bearing bandages all over it and, in another, a Phantom of the Opera-like half mask, made of gnarly-looking iron. I quite like that iron mask; both it and the bandages reminded me of the two-part origin episodes form Batman: The Animated Series, although I can't recall ever seeing him wear a mask like the metal one (In that cartoon, he awakens with bandages over half his face, but eventually loses them, and later wears half of a cowl/hood).

I can't really recommend this trade to anyone, it's not very good, and there are literally hundreds of Batman trades of equal or better quality out there, but I think the Arkham Asylum-derived stuff is at least worth taking notice of, if only because of the way it seems to have been a fairly successful outreach to a Batman-interested audience beyond direct market consumers, the way it seems to have influenced specific design choices of "The New 52" line-wide redesign (New 52 Batman, for example, looks more like the video game Batman then the Batman who appears in this comic based on the video game, and obviously New 52 Harley Quinn is heavily influenced by the game's Harleys; in fact, much of Jim Lee and company's New 52 designs seemed to have kept that live-action film costumes-by-MacFarlane Toys aesthetic visual accent) and the great extent to which DC's New 52 seem to be targeting the Arkham game audience with their content.

I'd still kinda like to read a straight adaptation of the games in comics format featuring superior artwork. In the meantime, I suppose I can just wait for DC to publish a paper collection of their Batman: Arkham Unhinged digital comics, which, if nothing else, should provide a decent look at the character designs that went into the games (Or hell, maybe there's a book simply devoted to character designs sketches...? Maybe I'd like that best of all...)

Sometimes my commenters think of much better jokes than I do.

Last night I posted the above image and noted that the cover credits seemed to indicate that Paul Dini was the only creator involved, instead of being one of the two writers whose work is within (not to mention the four pencil artists and three inkers).

Reader Heather's comment was actually better than the post of mine that she was responding to: "By looking at the cover we can clearly see Paul Dini collaborated with Batman on this run of Detective."

Damn, I wish I thought of that...

Paul Dini, one man band

I noticed copy of 2007's Batman: Detective at the library today, and was bemused by the presentation of the title and credits on the cover:
Who is the author of this book? Why it's none other than famed writer/artist Paul Dini, apparently.

Actually, if you've read any of these comics before, then you know Dini's just a writer, so he had to have at least one other guy helping him create the contents of this trade paperback, even if you ignore the inkers, colorists and letterers, as cover credits so often do.

This slim, 144-page trade includes six issues of Detective Comics, only five of which are written by Dini. It also includes a fill-in issue written by Royal McGraw, which kind of misses the point of fill-in issues—it's a story published specifically to meet a particular deadline to make sure that a monthly comic is actually on sale during a particular month, there's no reason to re-publish it in a trade collection. Particularly if it's a throwaway story about a minor villain from a Batman comic published over 20 years ago (which another writer already wrote fifteen years ago anyway), a villain who was killed off in the pages of another comic and especially if the organizing principle of your trade collection is the work of a particular writer, who is being given co-billing with freaking Batman on the cover.

Four different pencil artists have a hand in these stories by Dini and McGraw: J.H. Williams III, Don Kramer, Joe Benitez and Marcos Marz. And there are three different inkers. I note that not because it effects the quality of the book—each of these are one-off, done-in-one stories, so the book reads like an anthology anyway—but because that's an awful lot of people contributing to the creation of this book that aren't Paul Dini.

And yet the cover just says Dini. Not Dini and others or Dini and friends or Dini and McGraw, Williams, Kramer, Benitez and Marz in teensy-tiny font. Ditto the spine, which just has the words "Batman: Detective", "Paul Dini" and "DC Comics" on it.

Oh wait, here we go, in the lower right corner of the back cover, above the UPC symbol: