Batman on a horse. A carousel horse.

Have you been perusing #visiblewomen on Twitter the last few days? I hope you have, as there's a lot of great art to be seen, and a lot of great artists to discover. I found this image by Mindy Lee particularly striking, as it features a unique (to me) variation on perhaps my favorite way to see Batman drawn--on a horse.

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.

Suicide Squad: Who Created What, and What One Should (and Shouldn't) Read Next

This week Warner Bros released Suicide Squad, the second film in their troubled but ongoing efforts to construct a shared, "cinematic universe" based on DC comics, akin to what Marvel Studios has accomplished. Reviews so far seem pretty mixed, but then, decent quality films based on DC comics characters tend to be exceptions that prove the rule.

Regardless of its ultimate box office, Rotten Tomatoes rating and whether or not it's able to generate a sequel and Captain Boomerang spin-off, I think it's safe to say that a lot of people made a lot of money for their work on this film, and a lot of people are going to be credited (or blamed) with their contributions to the film. And, I think it's just as safe to say, few of those people will be comic book people.

Comic book supehero movies of this nature--big, ensemble efforts, including the Avengers movies and Guardians of The Galaxy--are of particular interest to me on this front because the studios assemble them from characters owned by a single publisher, but created by many different writers and artists, in many different contexts, often across decades. So I personally think it's valuable to stop and take stock of where all this stuff comes from, exactly. The characters that appear in this film were created between 1940 and 2008, and the particular concepts span a good sixty years, from the mid-twentieth century first appearance of a "Suicide Squad" to the late 1980s conception of the team as a super-villain Dirty Dozen to the 2011 incorporation of some of the characters on this line-up.

So:

Suicide Squad was originally created in a 1959 issue of The Brave and The Bold by Robert Kanigher and Ross Andru, and the Squad's handful of Silver Age adventures revolved around a quartet of non-super-powered specialists encountering bizarre, Silver Age threats. It was seemingly only the name that survived to influence future iterations and comic books (not to mention the movie), but the Kanigher/Andru stories did introduce a few characters and would later be used to provide backstory for the 1980s iteration of the team (Additionally, this version makes a brief appearance in the late, great Darwyn Cooke's New Frontier, which imagined various non-powered comics teams filling-in for superheroes in the years between the Golden Age and Silver Age of superheroes).

The concept of super-villains released from jail in order to serve as a black-ops team on suicide missions was John Ostrander's, who wrote the Suicide Squad monthly, ongoing series from 1987-1992 (occasionally with his wife, the late Kim Yale).

The Joker was created in 1940 by Bill Finger, Bob Kane and Jerry Robinson.

Deadshot first appeared in a 1950 issue of Batman, and was created by Bob Kane,David Vern Reed and Lew Schwartz, but you woudn't recognize him in his top hat, tuxedo and domino mask. His most familiar costume, including a full face mask, a scope over one-eye and wrist-mounted machine guns, was designed by artist Marshall Rogers during he and writer Steve Englehart's influential run on the Bat-books in the 1970s.

Rick Flag was created in 1959 by Kanigher/Andru as part of the original Suicide Squad. Ostrander and company used his son for their Suicide Squad revival, adding a "Jr." and a more late 1980s characterization.

Captain Boomerang was a Flash villain created in 1960 by John Broome by Carmine Infantino.

Enchantress was created by Bob Haney and Howard Purcell in 1966; rather than a villain, she was the star of a strip in Strange Adventures #187, in which she was the hero.

The original El Diablo was created in 1970 by Robert Kanigher and Gray Morrow, although the version that appears in the film, El Diablo III, has little in common with the original save the name. The third iteration was created by Jai Nitz, Phil Hester and Ande Parks for a 2008 miniseries of the same name, in which their El Diablo was haunted by the ghost of the original.

Killer Croc was created by Gerry Conway and Gene Colan in 1983, when he began is long and successful career as a Batman villain.

Katana was created by Mike W. Barr and Jim Aparo in 1983 and first appeared in an issue of The Brave and The Bold. She was a hero rather than a villain, and spent most of her career as a member of Batman's team The Outsiders, which she was involved with most incarnations of (In The New 52, she was briefly a member of both The Birds of Prey and the short-lived, government-sponsored Justice League of America. She also had her own short-lived ongoing).

Slipknot was a minor villain created by Gerry Conway, Joey Cavalieri and Rafael Kayanan for The Fury of Firestorm in 1984.

Amanda Waller first appeared in 1986's Legends #1, the crossover miniseries that first introduced the new, Ostrander conception of the Suicide Squad. She was created by Ostrander, Len Wein and John Byrne.

Harley Quinn is a particularly unusual character, being of both relatively recent vintage and originating not in the comic books, but another adaptation of the comics. She was created by Paul Dini and Bruce Timm (and I don't know, should original voice actress Arleen Sorkin receive some credit for her creation?) for a 1992 episode of the television cartoon Batman: The Animated Series ("Joker's Favor").

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That is the right half of the a two-page ad that has been running in DC Comics lately (the other half is an ad for the film itself). The suggestions for what to read are...interesting.

First, based on the ad, this would seem to be as much a Joker movie as a Suicide Squad movie. Second, it appears as if DC wasn't quite ready, as there are books one might expect, including the entirety of the Ostrander run of Suicide Squad which aren't yet collected, and solo titles featuring Katana and El Diablo that either weren't collected, or fell out of print, or DC just didn't want to publicize.

I also found the credits a little curious, as in a few cases they list both writer and primary artist, but in others they only list the writer, perhaps because there were so many artists involved that none could even really be called "primary."

If you liked the movie and wanted to read more about these characters, this ad seems like a good place to start. But as someone who has read most of these, I should warn you that DC seems to have chosen books based on their availability, rather than their quality. So maybe I can help you out, if you need it.

Let's walk through the books they have listed as suggestions, in the order they appear, together.

Suicide Squad Vol. 1: Kicked in the Teeth This is the first collection of the New 52 Suicide Squad series, and the third ongoing monthly series, following the original and the short-lived 2001revival attempt. It is, to put it kindly, garbage.

Suicide Squad Vol.1: Trial By Fire This collection includes the first eight issues of the 1987-launched Ostrander series. It definitely reads like a product of the 1980s, but is infinitely more readable than any post-Ostrander Suicide Squad monthlies.

Joker This was an original graphic novel by Brian Azzarello and Lee Bermejo, released around the time Dark Knight was in theaters, and it sold pretty well. This was Azzarello back when he was probably still best known as the guy who wrote 100 Bullets, and not the guy who wrote some Before Watchmen stuff against the wishes and over the objections of Watchmen writer and co-creator Alan Moore, had a controversial (and boring!) run on Wonder Woman, either wrote or co-wrote Dark Knight III: The Master Race (depending on who you ask), helped script the Batman: The Killing Joke direct-to-DVD cartoon and called someone a "pussy" at a San Diego Comic-Con panel about that cartoon. It was an attempt to turn the homicidal clown character into a grittier, more "realistic" character and I hate, hate, hated it. Killer Croc and Harley both have minor roles in it, neither particularly flattering (Harley's a stripper).

Batman: The Killing Joke Speaking of! This is the classic 1988 Alan Moore/Brian Bolland original graphic novel intended as both an origin of The Joker and a "last" Batman/Joker story...although since the ending was sublte and superhero comics aren't known for their subtlety, no one got it back in the day. It's a weird book, in that I think it's only grown more controversial the farther away we get from its original release, due to what happens to retired Batgirl Barbara Gordon in it, in a sort of classic example of fridging–decades before the phrase "Women In Refrigerators" and the verb "fridge" were coined. It's also the only story DC seems to think is so sacrosanct that they exempt it from their reboots, like The New 52-boot. Interestingly, this story sees Barbara Gordon paralyzed from the waist down, making it impossible for her to ever return to being Batgirl, so she turns to fighting crime a different way by becoming Oracle. Eventually. In the pages of...wait for it...Suicide Squad.

Batman: Arkham Asylum 25th Anniversarry Another late 1980s classic. This original graphic novel was Grant Morrison's first big hit, and a rare example of interior art from Dave McKean, probably still best known for his Sandman covers. It really helped popularize Arkham Asylum, and you can trace countless Batman comics stories and multi-media adaptations back to it. Again, not sure what it could have to do with the movie, but it does prominently feature The Joker, Batman (obviously) and Killer Croc is in there too. I've read rumors that Ben Affleck would like his Batman movie to revolve around Arkham, and I wouldn't be surprised if the next Batman movie did. Those Arkham videogames sure seemed popular and, as I've said before, the filmmakers should attempt a narrative that gets all of Batman's enemies in, given that cycles of the film tend to top out at around three or four.

Harley Quinn Vol. 1: Hot In The City The first collection of Amanda Conner, Jimmy Palmiotti and friends' Harley Quinn monthly series, launched a few years into the New 52, but prior to the "DCYou" initiative. It's very popular, although I don't really care for it. This collection features a few of the issues that were illustrated via artists jams though, so there's a lot of interesting stuff to look at.

Deadshot: Bulletproof This collects the six-part, 2005 minseries written by Chritos Gage and drawn by Steven Cummings and Jimmy Palmiotti. I've never read it! I like the sound of the premise though, which seems like it would be the basis for a Deadshot spin-off movie if they ever did such a thing, although i don't know why they would, as by himself he's just a guy with guns and a cool mustache, so not that different from any other action movie chracter, really. They give Deadshot a makeover here, and his costume is pretty good; much better than his terrible New 52 one, anyway.

New Suicide Squad Vol. 1: Pure Insanity I read the first few issues of this, DC's second attempt at a Suicide Squad ongoing. It's a step up from Kicked In The Teeth, but still a long way from good. I reviewed the first issue here on the week of its release, if you're interested (scroll down; it's the third book covered).

Batman Vol. 7: Endgame The seventh volume of Scott Snyder and Greg Capullo's Batman run, this is the big Joker/Batman rematch following the events "Death of The Family" (and a pretty good argument for limiting The Joker's appearances, giving them a sense of occasion in the process). I liked it.

Batman: Harley Quinn This 200-page collection features canonical DCU Harley Quinn stories, including her introduction into the DCU. If I'm reading the contents right, there's only one New 52 comic herein--the Forever Evil tie-in in which she blows up scores of Gotham City children in a massive terrorist attack--that was immediately at odds with her portrayal in her own series, which launched shortly after that story. There are also a few "continuity-lite" stories that may or may not fit in to a particularly version of the character, if you care about such things. I'm pretty sure I've read almost all of these, but I haven't re-read some in a while, and would be interested in seeing how the collection reads. Maybe I'll hunt this down. Anyway, I'll go ahead and recommend it, as it should provide a nice cross-section of Harley stories, including one from her co-creator. Be warned that these will mostly be "original" Harley, rather than the decidedly more mask-less and pants-less version of the film.

What would I add? Well, DC has been very, very slowly collecting the original Suicide Squad monthly (i.e. the good one). So far you can find not only Vol. 1: Trial By Fire, included above, but also Vol. 2: The Nightshade Odyssey, Vol.3: Rogues and Vol. 4: The Janus Directive. DC recently released a 30th Anniversary edition of Legends, in which the Squad plays a small role...although it is their first appearance. It looks like DC is planning a release of the Silver Age iteration, in a hardcover entitled Suicide Squad: The Silver Age Omnibus; it looks pricey, but I'd be interested in reading it.

For more Deadshot, I'd recommend not only Deadshot: Bulletproof, but also Deadshot: Beginnings by John Ostrander, Kim Yale and Luke McDonnel, which features a spin-off miniseries from Suicide Squad and early battles with Batman. Also, you might want to check Gail Simone's run on Secret Six (pre-New 52), which prominently featured Deadshot. The book, featuring a team of six villains who had a habit of losing their sixth on a regular basis fighting worse villains, was something of a spiritual successor to Ostander's Suicide Squad.

For more Joker and Harley, there are so many comics and collections featuring each that its hard to know where to begin. Suffice it to say that if you walk into any comic shop you won't have too hard a time tracking down comics featuring them. For The Joker, I'd recommend 2014's The Joker: A Celebration of 75 Years, if only because it offers such a good overview of the character's various interpretations over the decades; for Harley Quinn, I'd recommend the Paul Dini/Bruce Timm "Mad Love," most recently collected as The Batman Adventures: Mad Love Deluxe Edition, but if you can find it, 2011's Batman: Mad Love and Other Stories is a better bet, as it collects a bunch of other, similar Harley stories.

For more Killer Croc, there's Batman Arkham: Killer Croc which is a greatest hits kind of collection. I haven't read it, but I've read many of the stories within, and I see it contains my two favorite Croc stories by my two favorite Batman artists, Norm Breyfogle and Kelley Jones.

Afterbirth: DC's "Rebirth" initiative, week ten

Suicide Squad: Rebirth #1 by Rob Williams, Philip Tan, Jonathan Glapion, Scott Hanna, Sandu Florea and Alex Sinclair

It's not surprise at all that DC launched the Suicide Squad Rebirth special, essentially the first of two #1 issues of the next volume of the series designed as a jumping on point, the Wednesday of the week that the much-anticipated Suicide Squad movie opened (do not the the series that re-launched this week, Harley Quinn, the solo book of the Squad member who appears to be the most likely to be the breakout star of the film–although I could just be basing that on the fact that she seems to be the only burst of color in the film's line-up).

What is more surprising is that it took DC this long to so closely align their Suicide Squad monthly comic with the movie's look and line-up. I mean, I'm pretty sure the trailers have been unspooling for about 43 years or so now, Internet time, and yet DC decided to hold off until the actual release of the film to start trying to capitalize on the interest (Unless you want to count the Suicide Squad's Most Wanted series of anthology miniseries, and, I suppose, the Harley Quinn & The Suicide Squad April Fools' Special).

So let's quickly review the recent history here. The Suicide Squad concept was reinvented in 1987 by writer John Ostrander, who imagined a secret government task force lead by Amanda Waller that plucks pliable super-villains from prison, outfits them with explosive arm bracelets and more-or-less pressgangs them on accepting extremely dangerous, off-the-books black-ops missions. It was pretty damn popular, and remains particularly well regarded today–despite DC's sluggish pace at releasing the trade collections (which, it should be said, still read quite well, but do feel like mainstream comics published in the late 1980s).

DC hasn't really pulled off a successful revival of the book between the conclusion of that original series in 1992, despite a few attempts, ranging from guest-appearances in other books to a 12-issue 2001 attempt to an Ostrander-helmed miniseries.

When faced with the prospect of launching 52 new titles (and keeping 52 or so titles in publication at all times) in September of 2011, DC naturally revived the Suicide Squad, making the in retrospect brilliant decision to put the Batman: Arkham video-game sexy Joker version of Harley Quinn front and center (although, it should be noted, she did have something of an antecedent in the original book's run in the form of violent clown lady in love with violent clown guy, Jewlee). The first issue of that series was almost as poorly constructed as it was extremely unpleasant to read, and, like most New 52 books, it featured random redesigns that were usually bad (does anyone like the new Deadshot costume better than the previous two or, hell, three?), but also just mind-bogglingly off: Changing the type of shark King Shark resembled, shaving off Deadshot's signature mustache and, most notoriously, turning short, wide, middle-aged woman Waller into a tall, young, buxom Barbie-doll who half wears her shirts (Particularly galling when one considers that Waller is the DC Universe's most prominent full-figured woman, and has been since, I don't know, Etta Candy* in the 1940s, maybe...?).

The book did well enough that it wasn't canceled like so many New 52 books, but it sold poorly enough that it was relaunched as New Suicide Squad in 2014 (like Deathstroke and Teen Titans then, it was a book that DC kinda-sorta canceled only to immediately relaunch).

That brings us to this week, and the launch of Suicide Squad (volume...four, I guess), the book's third iteration since fall of 2011 (much like Red Hood, which we covered last week).

There are a few remarkable things about this launch, the most immediately apparent being how closely it's following the lead of the film version. Harley Quinn was recently redesigned to more closely resemble the version played by Margot Robie in the film, and while only one of the characters she's holding Polaroid photos of on the cover appears within, all three of them are on the roster in the film.

Inside, Waller has resumed her pre-New 52 appearance, and this issue is written by Williams in the "bridge" fashion that so many of the Rebirth one-shots, transitioning from the previous series (here, the last issues of New Suicide Squad) and the upcoming new series.

President Barack Obama yells at Waller in his office for a while about how goddam horrible and un-American the Suicide Squad is–and, I think it's worth noting, the book flourished in the Reagan and beginnings of the first Bush administration, but never found its footing again until 2011, when it survived, but wasn't actually any good. Politically, it's a very late Cold War, Reagan-esque concept that seems at odds with the Obama zeitgeist, even if he is the president who got Osama bin Laden and killed more terrorists, suspected terrorists and people standing too close to terrorists or suspected terrorists with drone strikes than even his predecessor, whose administration was generally perceived as a war-mongering one.

When Obama insists that "someone has to know" about what the Squad does, if, as Waller suggests, the public, the Justice League and even the president can't, that "someone has to represent the American people...someone must be held accountable," Waller agrees. She introduces readers to Colonel Rick Flag, a highly decorated and heroic Navy Seal who has recently disappeared from the public eye (This also serves in bringing the comic book Suicide Squad closer to that of the movie...and of the 1987-1992 run, where Flag performed a similar function, as the soldier leading the criminals rigged to explode). Obama agrees and dismisses her.

She then approaches Flag, who is himself in a position not too far removed from those of the various Squaddies: He's rotting away in Guantanamo Bay, but, in his case, for a crime he refused to commit. Waller makes an aggressive sales pitch to him that includes letting him out of his cell if he agrees to lead the Squad, along the way introducing him to three of the more popular members: Harley, Deadshot and Captain Boomerang.

Naturally, he agrees, and the end of the issue finds Flag–here dressed in standard issue military gear rather than the tight-fitting yellow t shirt that used to be his self-appointed uniform–helping rescue the trio from a seemingly impossible situation and leading them into a particularly poorly drawn splash page that concludes the book.

On the very next page is a full-page ad, featuring Jim Lee's cover for the first issue of the new series, which features just about everyone in the movie team, excepting only El Diablo, Flag and Slipknot, who I assume dies at some point in the movie, because, come on, it's Slipknot.

It's kind of difficult to assess where exactly the book is going based on these 20 pages, but Williams' story was a lot less unpleasant than other first issues featuring the New 52 Squad. The extended business with Obama and Flag at least recalls (or maybe just leans in the direction) of the occasional focus on geo-politics of the original, and, like I said, the line-up is at least reflective of the new multi-media version of the team. Williams' script highlights the cold-blooded, hardcore nature of these "heroes," and earns the book it's "T+" rating.

As I've said before, the New 52-era Squad is at a disadvantage to the original, in that it doesn't have the deep, deep bench of obscure villains and even more obscure superheroes, given that it is working with a history that is just about five years old. The character pool therefore lacks flexibility and expendability, and few if any of these characters have much in the way of "history," since almost no character in the DC Universe has a history anymore (Batman villains Harley Quinn and Killer Croc are best positioned in that regard). That said, the film is similarly working with characters that lack any history other than what it is inventing for them, so it's not like it can't work, it will just be a pretty different book. If Shade The Changing Man shows up here, for example, it's not quite the same as Ostrander plucking a character from limbo as it was in the late 1980s.

The artwork is fairly terrible, but then, there hasn't been a good-looking run of Suicide Squad in the previous two volumes, either. Lee's presence on the monthly should presumably boost sales and bring some quality to the proceedings. One major problem with the New 52, particular when it was first launched, is that the publisher seemed intent on producing a line that looked like it was drawn by people who were trying to draw like Jim Lee, which is exactly what they got, as only one of the guys drawing any of those 52 comics was Jim Lee.

Tan's style is very much of that school. The four inkers naturally give the book a rough, uneven look, although when frequent Lee collaborator Scott Williams inks Tan's work, it reaches its most Lee-like. There are a lot big panels and splash pages, and little in the way of good old-fashioned comic book storytelling.

The first page is a splash featuring a pile of photos. There are three more splashes, the last of which looks like a page Tan simply sketched (the characters are all kind of floating in free space, unaffected by gravity) and that Sinclair finished for him in the coloring stage, filling in all the white space with the coloring effects symbolizing explosions. I think six is the most number of panels on any one page, while many pages have no more than two to four panels a piece.

As I said, Waller is back to her original look. Deadshot is still wearing his terrible New 52 costume. Harley is wearing her latest costume from Harley Quinn and sporting a film-inspired look, making her look like a compromise between the Amanda Conner design and the film design, although Tan gives her a weird, wide, round baby-face. Captain Boomerang always looks "wrong" to me when he's not wearing his crazy Silver Age outfit with the boomerang-patterned shirt and silk scarf, but he too looks like something of a compromise design: The big, bushy sideburns seen in the film, and a dark-hued, more "bad-ass" version of the costume he's been wearing various iterations of since, I don't know, Identity Crisis or so.

I don't exactly have high hopes for the book, but DC has at least done a pretty good job in aligning it to the film version while simultaneously aligning it to the most successful iteration of the book. It therefore has the potential to please a lot more would-be readers or potential fans than it has to annoy, confound or confuse them.

Harley Quinn #1 by Amanda Conner, Jimmy Palmiotti, Chad Hardin and Alex Sinclair

As apparently the only DC Comics fan who doesn't find Amanda Conner and Jimmy Palmiotti's Harley Quinn comics the least bit funny, I was chagrinned to make it to page three of the first issue of the rebooted series only to find that the writing team chose to entitle their story "Afterbirth!", which, you'll note, is what I have been calling my weekly assessment of DC's "Rebirth" initiative. Given how far in advance comics tend to be written–as well as the fact that I'm fairly certain neither Palmiotti or Conner read my blog–I'm confident that it is sheer coincidence. But man, it does reflect rather poorly on me that the writers I don't find funny decided to make the exact joke about "Rebirth" that I did.

Sigh.

So this is a rather strange first issue and "jumping-on point" for Conner and Palmiotti's Harley Quinn comics, the main title of which, Harley Quinn, will still be written by that particular team, still drawn primarily by artist Chad Hardin and not exactly changing direction in any evident way.

There are two rather long info-dump sequences that account for the first six-to-eight pages of the 20-page comic, before the actual story begins. There are two pages of Harley and Poison Ivy enjoying a spa day together, while the two talk about the fact that Harley has become a community leader in Coney Island, running multiple businesses. And then there are four pages in which Harley stands on a stage with a microphone, recounting a version of her New 52 origin story and parading out her entire supporting cast, from Big Tony and the taxidermied beaver present in the book in order to make beaver jokes, to the sideshow freaks employed in the sideshow she kinda sorta runs now, to her gang (which recently earned their own miniseries, Harley Quinn and Her Gang of Harleys to the members of her roller derby team.

Then two pages are spent revealing her audience, Red Tool, a masked character who speaks in yellow, tool-shaped dialogue bubbles (who, I am ashamed to admit, I just realized a few weeks ago is meant to be a Deadpool stand-in, a rather ballsy move from one-time Deadpool writer Palmiotti, considering that when he and Conner launched their Harley Quinn series, it was essentially as a cheesecake version of Deadpool, with beaver jokes) and a now power-less genie characternamed Jimm Salabim.

And while she gives the pair a tour of the wax museum she's temporarily running, an zombie outbreak occurs. The cause? Well, we flashback 98 hours to a four-page sequence in which an alien shape-changer disguised as a cow is accidentally slaughtered for meat, and those who consume the tainted meat turn into zombies, apparently.

If that sounds familiar, then you've either read or heard of the 1995 Grant Morrison and Mark Millar-written Marvel series Skrull Kill Krew, in which shape-changing green aliens in the form of cows are slaughtered, and imbue some of those who eat the tainted meat are transformed; given that this book also has a Deadpool pastiche that's less parody than appropriation, it's difficult to tell what to make of this sequence, exactly.

Also familiar? When Deadpool/Red Tool gets bitten on the hand he worries aloud if that means he might be infected, Harley immediately chops most of his arm off. Did you guys read Hitman, specifically "Zombie Night at The Gotham Aquarium"...? Hopefully so, as that book is the best, and that story in particular is where the series started to come into its own. Anyway, when one of the characters gets bitten on the hand by a zombie, he immediately uses a chainsaw to cut off his own hand, based on the fact that in zombie movies he's seen that's the only way to prevent zombification after being bit (He is almost immediately informed by the mad scientist behind the zombie gas that he cut his hand off for no reason, however, as that's not how it works in real life).

And that's pretty much it. A long review of Harley Quinn continuity to date (skipping over the stuff that doesn't quite fit with Conner and Palmiotti's take on the character, which is basically all the stuff from the various New 52 Suicide Squad comics), followed by a zombie outbreak story that features two references of dubious nature to Big Two comics of the mid-to-late 1990s, which is at least one too many to fall within just 12-pages.

I don't think I'm going to like the post-"Rebirth" Harley Quinn any better than the pre-"Rebirth" Harley Quinn.

Chad Hardin's interior artwork, and Conner's covers, remain the book's strongest selling points.


*Who also saw a redesign that made her taller, slimmer, younger and all-around more traditionally sexy as part of the New 52's redesigns of the entire DC Universe.

Amanda Conner and Jimmy Palmiotti understand the defining element of Hal Jordan's character.

Sure, the writers of Harley Quinn's Little Black Book may have played rather fast and loose with the "rules" of the variously-colored power rings in the second issue of their bi-monthly team-up series (drawn this time by John Timms and Mauricet), just as they ignored the timeline of the New 52 in their first issue (I guess we can chalk the title's continuity-lite status up to it having an unreliable–meaning "insane"–narrator), but in the above panel they demonstrate that they know exactly what it is that makes Hal Jordan who he is.

Hal Jordan is a guy who gets hit in the head a lot.

There are also a few gags about Harley touching Jordan's butt (which at least one of you will likely appreciate), and the more standard line of making fun of the character: His complete lack of imagination when it comes to power ring constructs, the defaults being a handful of the types of sports equipment that might have been found in your father or grandfather's childhood toy box.

A few quick notes on Harley's Little Black Book #1

DC's recently launched Harley's Little Black Book is a bi-monthly team-up pairing the writing team of the Harley Quinn monthly with rotating artists, and it's seemingly patterned after old-school team-up books like The Brave and the Bold, which teamed Batman with a different DC character each issue, and DC Comics Presents, which did the same with Superman.

As I mentioned when it was first announced, it doesn't seem like a bad idea for a book at all, really, nor does it seem to threaten "Peak Harley," as the publisher continues to find new ways to cash in on the character's rather sudden and random popularity (her prominent place in the upcoming film Suicide Squad should help sustain that popularity for a few more publishing quarters, too). Considering the many one-shot specials and miniseries that the Harley Quinn writing team of Jimmy Palmiotti and Amanda Conner have been pumping out ever since it became apparent their particular take on the character (Sexy Deadpool) was a popular one, if Little Black Book simply replaces all those other Harley books on the shelves, the actual number of Palmiotti and Conner-written Harley comics pages will remain more-or-less consistent.

This first issue teams Harley with Wonder Woman, complete with a particularly elaborate variant cover scheme involving opaque-polybags to disguise which version of the cover you get (this scheme was stretched out across a chunk of the DC line, actually, to help "celebrate" the release of this book). But let's forget that the comics industry has returned to polybabbing comics (which, incidentally, makes them impossible to flip-through and, at least tacitly, encourages certain readers to either never open them at all, or buy two copies, one to open and one to keep sealed so it will retain it's original "value" of what will almost certainly be "less than the paper it's printed on," if the past is a good indication of what might occur in the future).

Reading the first issue, I was most struck by how it read just like another, extra issue of the parent title. There's no attempt to contextualize the goings-on of the book–which includes Harley at the head of a large, Harley Quinn-themed gang with goofy names, assisted by a re-re-booted version of the old Wonder Woman villain Egg Fu–and, for better or worse, simply squeezes the guest-star into the proceedings.

The plot is that the Gang of Harleys, or "Gang a' Harleys" as Harley refers to them, have stumbled on a London-based supervillain's plot to kill London-based superhero Wonder Woman. The villain is named "Barmy Bugger," and he's "The London Legion of Superheroes' number one villain," according to Harley's Oracle, Egg Fu. As a closet Wonder Woman fan, Harley can't let this happen, but she also wants to be in on the save herself, so as to team up with Wondy. She therefore launches a dumb plan to travel to London and replace Wonder Woman.

Conner draws most of the book, while John Timms draws about 12 pages. Conner's relatively heavy involvement in the art chores should be reason enough for many Harley Quinn fans to pick up the book; the main criticism of Harley Quinn's art has been that, as good as the interiors might be, they're not drawn by Conner, a fan-favorite artist who mostly just provides covers.

Bottom line, if you like the monthly Harley Quinn, you should like this just fine; if you're reading it just for Wonder Woman, though, well, keep in mind it's very much a Harley Quinn comic in which Wonder Woman happens to appear.

There are a few things I wanted to point out:

1.) The narration boxes are designed to resemble the ruled or lined paper one might find in a notebook or journal, albeit colored red bleeding into black, with white font. The suggestion is that it's written by Harley herself, then, as she's narrating in first-person (Do note those opaque polybags feature Harley scribbling in a notebook). However, Harley writes in her accent, which is fucking weird.

2.) The continuity of this comic doesn't work, like, at all.

Remember that the current DC Universe is about six years old or so, with Justice League #1 being set "five years ago." That was the first comic of The New 52 continuity, and that first story arc featured the first meetings between Superman and Batman, Batman and Green Lantern Hal Jordan, Everyone and Wonder Woman, Everyone and Aquaman, et cetera. The characters were all presumably around for a few months previously (Batman and Superman had time to change costumes from those they wore during the first volume of Action Comics and "Zero Year" respectively, for example, and Hal Jordan met The Flash previously, and so on). If we consider the fact that the "present" of September 2011 is now about a year or two ago (according to the pages of Batman), well, we're looking at a Wonder Woman who has been active in Man's World for, what, seven years, tops?

Now, how old is Harley Quinn, exactly? At least 25, right?

And yet, when she was in grade school "Years and years ago," she was watching TV footage of Wonder Woman (in the pre-New 52 costume that shouldn't exist anymore) and idolizing the Amazon princess/superhero, to the extent that she even dressed up in an old-school, 1970s-era plastic mask and Wonder Woman costume (again, a pre-New 52 version) to beat up some bullies at school, nearly hanging one to death.

This...doesn't work. Even if we allow that Flashback Harley was, I don't know, as old as 11, and even if we allow that Wonder Woman has been a public superhero for as many as seven years, that would make current Harley Quinn only 18, which is pretty impossible, considering she's been active for 5-7 years as Harley Quinn too (and, at some point, had to go to college and grad school and get a doctorate prior to even becoming Harley Quinn).

Yes, I know I am being that guy, but that's just because I am that guy! Please mark this down as Reason #345,627 on your list of Why The New 52 Reboot Was a Bad Idea. The timeline in this story would have worked fine in the pre-Flashpoint DCU, but doesn't work in The New 52 at all. If you think about such things at all. And maybe you need not. While Harley Quinn and this book are both set squarely in-continuity, they do tend to play a bit faster and looser with the "rules" of the shared setting, to the point that sometimes the Harley who appears here seems to be a completely different one than the one who is part of Suicide Squad's ensemble, or appears elsewhere in the DCU.

3.) This is at least the second time that Palmiotti and Conner do the Harley Quinn's-boobs-aren't-as-big-as-another-heroine's gag. They previously used it on a cover of the parent title in which Harley tries on guest-star Power Girl's costume, but can't fill it out.

Here she strips Wonder Woman of her costume and puts it on herself, needing to tape it up to keep it on. When Wonder Woman awakens naked in her own bathtub amid a firefight, she's apparently forced to dress in the only clothes available to her: Harley's discarded and way-too-small costume, giving Conner the opportunity to draw Wonder Woman exploding out of that.

It's a gag they are fond of enough that it's also used as the cover for this issue.

Well, the regular cover (above), not the image on the polybag, or one of the three variant covers that might be inside the polybagged version.

4.) I did really like the Wonder Woman car chase secene, which does not involve Wonder Woman in a car. She's first shown chasing a speeding car down on foot...

...and then later leaps/flies over the car to land in front of it, where she somehow manages to slice it completely in half with her sword...

It's a big, stupid scene that doesn't make sense (the car-chopping, not the other parts), but it's also pretty awesome, and, as well all know, in the world of superhero comics, if something is sufficiently awesome, it doesn't have to make sense.

So whatever other weaknesses the book might have–and, again, if you like Harley Quinn, then you'll like Harley's Little Black Book–it at least has that scene going for it.

Review: Harley Quinn Holiday Special #1

DC sure hasn't been shy about striking while this particular iron is hot. The new Harley Quinn solo series, the character's second, launched in November of last year with a #0 issue featuring one drawn-out fourth-wall breaking gag and drawn by a who's who of artists. It probably shouldn't have been a surprise that that issue was a hit, but, rather remarkably, the issues that followed also sold very well.

Perhaps it was the higher profile the already sorta popular character received thanks to various video games, perhaps it was the presence of cover artist and co-writer Amanda Conner, perhaps it was that the book was in the DC Universe line of books, while striking a very different tone and style than that of the other 51 or so books in "The New 52." Whatever the reason, Harley Quinn was working better than pretty much anything other than Scott Snyder and Greg Capullo on Batman.

And so in the last year DC has published Harley Quinn Invades Comic-Con International and Harley Quinn Annual #1, both with the sam basic different-artist-for-every-scene format as the #0 issue (the annual additional boasting the incentive of being a scratch 'n sniff rub 'n smell comic), and, just this last week, Harley Quinn Holiday Special #1.

It's a 36-page, three-story anthology, featuring two Christmas story and one New Year's story, which is why it's called a Holiday special and not a Christmas special, Kirk Cameron.

All three stories are written by the regular Harley Quinn writing team of Conner and Jimmy Palmiotti, and each drawn by a different artist, each of whom works in a much looser, more distinctive style than regular Harley Quinn artist Chad Hardin (At the rate they're going, I wonder if Harley will be the next DC super-character to get a digital-first anthology series following Wonder Woman, Superman and Batman).

The first of these, entitled "Bad Toy," is the longest, and at 19 pages is essentially an extra issue of Harley Quinn, albeit with guest art by Mauricet. Harley, who is apparently now a pet hoarder, failed to properly spay or neuter her many pets (Public service announcement: Spay or neuter your pets!), and they've been multiplying like rabbits. She and her friend Tony come up with a brilliant plan to get rid of them: They dress up as "Santa's Helpers" who volunteer to carry packages to the cars of shoppers and, if they think the shoppers will be good pet-owners, they hide a puppy or kitten in one of their bags.

But on Christmas Eve, Harley decides to check on one of them, and ends up getting busted Christmas morning. The cartoonishly bratty little girl of the house thinks Harley herself is the present, and so the girl's father bribes Harley into playing along for a while...but to make herself so undesirable a playmate that the girl gets rid of her of her own volition.

It reads much less complicated in-story.

Anyway, Harley eventually solves the family's problems by virtue of being immature, juvenile and a deranged lunatic with a heart of gold. It works surprisingly well as a Christmas story and a Harley Quinn story.

The art is pretty great. Mauricet has a highly kinetic, highly expressive style used to great effect throughout, The characters—human and animal alike—are highly expressive, and Harley is drawn as super-sexualized as usual, but with a good girl, cartoonish edge that bleeds toward parody.

That's followed by a shorter, sillier story entitled "Get Yer Cheer Outta My Ear," in which Conner and Palmiotti introduce us to the humbug, a tiny parasitic insect that embeds itself in the ear of a human host hums Christmas music directly into the brain of its victim. Then they introduce it into Harley.

She is saved by Santa Claus in a way that isn't as dirty as this panel might imply...

...who then takes Harley out to dinner at a kosher deli and expresses his thanks to "these great people" for not celebrating Christmas, and thus "making my job easier each year!"

This one is drawn by Brandt Peters, in a painterly, picture book style that reinterprets Harley as a big, bobble-headed doll.

Finally, there's "Killin' Time," drawn by Darwyn Cooke, who is probably the ideal Harley Quinn artist, at least this side of her creator Bruce Timm. Cooke's Harley is Harley as originally conceived and designed for her birthplace, Batman: The Animated Series, although Cooke renders her in her "New 52" look, with the bone-white skin and half-red, half-black hair. He additionally outfits her with a winter version of her costume (In Mauricet's story, she merely wears her regular duds, albeit more skimpy versions, with a jingle-bell collar and short leather jacket; in Peters', she puts a coat and furry boots oon over her roller derby uniform).

The story here is one of cartoonish insanity, made more cartoonish still by Cooke's suepr-flat, unapologetically 2D artwork (I imagine the jokes in the regular series would sing much better if they were always drawn in such a style). On New Year's Eve, Harley notices that she has a gray hair—not sure how that works, given her New 52 origin—and when her friends tell her about Father Time and the New Year's Baby, she becomes convinced that all she has to do to stop from growing older is track down a Mr. Harold Tyme, an elderly patient of hers in a nearby hospital, and either break his magical time piece and/or murder him.

No one gets murdered, and while Harley doesn't exactly learn a lesson in this one, she does get that gray hair taken care of.

I'm inclined to say that I wish Cooke was drawing Harley Quinn monthly, but then, I'd rather see him work on other, better comics, particularly ones he might be more passionate about. But then, if he's just going to waste his time on things like Before Watchmen projects and vigorously, ignorantly defending them in interviews with industry media outlets, well, he might as well be drawing Harley Quinn comics monthly, you know?

In-between the stories are a pair of Billy Tucci-drawn holiday pin-ups, both needlessly labeled "Pin-Up." The first features New 52 Harley in front of a wreath and dangling mistletoe above her head, the second features the Bombshell version of Harley (save this one has all-white skin) in front of the New Year's Ball.

I'm not really a fan of Palmiotti and Gray's take on the character, which amounts to little more than a sexy Halloween costume version of Marvel's Deadpool, but I enjoyed the looks of all three of these stories, and while some of the previously mentioned Harley comics feature more artists, this one is probably the best preview or gateway comic into what all the Harley Quinn hype is about, as it allows the regular writers to tell short, complete stories, each with talented artists who stick around long enough to make an impression, rather than just drawing a page or three.


***********************

Hey, any of you out there regularly Harley Quinn readers? If so, can you identify the...character in the below panel who appears to be a large egg in some kind of robot suit...?

That's not the New 52 version of obscure-ish Wonder Woman villain Egg Fu, who Grant Morrison and company resurrected for the weekly 52 series, as a giant-er egg in a big robot suit, is it...?

Just wondering. I checked out of the Harley Quinn monthly after about two issues, and have only read the specials since then.

Review: Harley Quinn Invades Comic-Con International San Diego #1

I generally loathe the very concept of having issue numbers with decimal points in them, something Marvel has indulged in quite a bit over the past few years and DC flirted with during their weird "Villains Month" last September, but this book actually seems like one in which an issue number with a decimal point in it would actually work. That's because in its format, style, tone and even some of its marketing, Harley Quinn Invades Comic-Con International San Diego #1 reads a lot like Harley Quinn #0; think of this as Harley Quinn #0.1.

As such, it promises many of the same pleasures, but also many of the same pitfalls and, unfortunately, there are fewer pleasures here than in the #0 issue, but much more time spent in the pitfalls, as the book becomes quite quickly overtaken by weird in-jokes, many of which feature various DC comics executives and creators, appearing in scenes in which the jokes are sometimes at the expense of the people who buy and read DC comics. That's sort of weird, right?

As with every issue of the New 52 version of the Harley Quinn solo comic, it is written by the husband and wife team of Amanda Conner and Jimmy Palmiotti, with the former providing the cover: Here a wraparound cover in which we see Harley running past a line of DC cosplayers and stereotypes (Because this is a DC comic, all of the comics characters represented by cosplayers, merchandise and background noise—note the Kaley Cuoco Power Girl movie poster between Harley's pigtails on the cover—are either DC characters, or generic character-types. Similar to the way that Warner Bros' direct-to-DVD Scooby-Doo: Mask of The Blue Falcon was set at a comics convention where the only superheroes in existence seemed to be ones from Hanna-Barbera cartoons, a gag that worked a bit better for the Scooby movie, given its higher level of ridiculousness).

The artwork, as that in the #0 issue, comes courtesy of a sort of all-star jam line-up, although it's worth noting that, despite a higher page count, there are fewer stars involved in this issue, and many of them boast a much lower wattage. Paul Pope kicks everything off with a four-panel first page in which Harley leaps into a two-page splash title page, laughing "HA HA!!" in Pope's hand-writing in a little, Pope-shaped dialogue bubble. It's only a page, but yeah, he certainly qualifies as one of "the GREATEST ARTISTS of ALL TIME!" mentioned on the cover (What? No "comics" qualifier between "greatest" and "artists"...?).

From there, though, the caliber of creator slips. EDILW favorite Damion Scott and Robert Campanella contribute five pages, Amanda Conner herself draws three and Stephane Roux two and from there the line-up consists of creators I'm much less familiar with: Javier Garron, John Timms, Marco Failla and Dave Johnson (plus four different colorists!).

The premise is that Harley has traveled to SDCC with some of the characters that live in the building he runs in Coney Island; I'm not sure what exactly their business is, but I think it has something to do with old-school carnie folk, and they're here to sell merchandise of some kind (I didn't make it very far past the #0 issue of the Harley Quinn monthly, before the mixture of poor humor and aggressive, desperate joke-making turned me off; it's fine to tell lame jokes and to fail to be funny constantly—I'd be a hypocrite to suggest otherwise!—but in Harley Quinn those lame jokes are always delivered with an off-putting confidence bordering on arrogance, a sort of wackiness or zaniness produced by writers who crack their knuckles, sit down at the keyboard and announce, "Okay, let's write some wacky and zany stuff!").

Harley's con invasion is broken up into days, so under the banner of "Day One: Tuesday" she and friends arrive, and we get the first instance of a running gag that will be repeated every few pages. Harley will see someone in the crowd and say, "Oh my God! It's that--" and in a string of off-center, no-spaces verbiage she will rattle off some long, complicated back-story to the person's career or stuff they are famous for, before ending with, "I love that guy!"

If you're reading the comic, and not just this review of it, then I hope you liked that gag. Because you'll be seeing a lot more of it. A lot more.

It's in the hotel that night that she shows her friend Queenie her portfolio, which features her own superhero creation, "Hurl Girl," who is "a superhero that up-chucks her way out of any situation." This accounts for Conner's interior work, three pages of black-and-white comics featuring the character; turns out Harley draws a lot like Conner, only slightly rougher.

Later, she hijacks a truck of DC Comics clothes and gives them away to the homeless, and beats up and nearly murders a waitress at "Rude Rick's Hateful Hideaway," one of those mean-on-purpose places.

On Day Two, John Timms takes over the art (I really like his sharp lines and angles, and he's got a great style, but oh boy does his Harley costume suddenly shrink dramatic, compared to what Scott had her wearing in the previous sequences).

Here we get our first DC Comics cameos, as Harley approaches "Katie Kubert, DC Editor," who Timms draws in a more illustrative style (ditto the other real people). She suggests Harley talk to Bob Harras, DC's Editor-In-Chief regarding a portfolio review, and when Harley asks how she can ever thank Kubert, the editor responds "When you are rich and famous, hire me out of this soul-sucking job."

Ha ha it's funny because...working for DC is horrible...?

To illustrate how terrible the job is, she's show to be surrounded by three fans asking innocent if inane questions about DC Comics plot points, scheduling and creators.

Gross! DC fans! Is there anything a DC Editor hates more?

Unfortunately for Harley, Bob Harras is talking to Batman, which is...weird. I don't know if this is meant to be the "real" Batman or just someone dressed like Batman, but Harley, who is, remember, the "real" Harley, says it's Batman, and while she is an unreliable narrator, this Batman is drawn like Batman might be drawn—big, muscular, square jaw, cool suit—so...I don't know.

Harley pantses Batman in order to make Batman look bad and show her portfolio to Harras (who, luckily, doesn't get any dialogue, so he doesn't come across like an asshole, like a lot of the other folks Palmiotti and Conner include). It doesn't work, but we do see that Batman–or a guy who dresses like Batman—wears boxers with Harley Quinn on them under the suit (apparently the utility belt doesn't actually hold his pants up?).

How one wears boxers with skin-tight spandex pants, I don't know, but there's got a be a lot of bunching and chafing going on in Batman's nether regions. Explains the scowl, I guess.

Thrown out for that, Harley tries a variety of hijinx to get back in, and eventually stumbles into a room of guys dressed up like The Joker, at which point she breaks the fourth wall...

...and comes out of the room on the next page, her hair a mess, saying "Yeah, yeah, I know none of them was the real Mistah J... ...But I hadda make sure."

The fake Jokers, meanwhile, are all drawn with their lipstick smeared al over their faces and their hair tousled—so she apparently just smooched them all. Don't use that much imagination!

Day Three, drawn by Marco Failla, finds Harley partying with a limo full of Harley cosplayers, all of whom are dressed as different versions of her. They say they want to go out for a night of mayhem, but, not realizing that Harley's the real Harley, they turn out not to be ready for her brand of mayhem.

Day Four brings us more DC cameos and in-jokes, including the bizarre one I ranted and raved about the other day. Dan DiDio is being interviewed in front of a television camera, and the interview consists of him rambling a bunch of jokes that seem to be at his own expense...

...but then there's that weird bit about editorial oversight, and I'm not even sure I get it. In the previous panel, they were taking something absolutely real and true—DC's dumb September events with gimmick covers that proved hard and expensive to create, according to DC—and exaggerating it for comedic effect.

But then, in the next panel, he's talking about how they're launching a new line with no editorial input, just creators going crazy and doing what they want (that is, how most of the comics that aren't produced by DC, Marvel and some part of a few other publishers' lines are produced), but that's not an exaggeration of something true, but the exact opposite of the current situation.

So while the sequence starts out by making fun of DiDio, it then seems to pivot to having DiDio making fun of...DC Comics readers? Again?

And then there's the weird swipe at Marvel, in which Harley Quinn, currently starring in a book that is basically just DC's answer to Deadpool's recent success, laments that they "aren't looking for anything new or original."

And then the day closes with a brief, un-embarrassing cameo by Geoff Johns...

What's with the hat, I wonder? Has Johns got a little bald spot going? If so, just shave your head, man! Embrace baldness! It's very freeing!

Day Five, and it's time for a Jim Lee joke! Jim Lee—also wearing a baseball cap!—reviews Harley's portfolio in a six-panel sequence, in which thoughts race through her head in very wordy thought bubbles, as Lee silently looks at her work and she tries to guess what he's thinking, growing angrier and angrier until he says something nice at the end, and she skips away, overjoyed.

This lead to my favorite gag in the comic, a reference to Stan Lee: "I could give a crap his dad created all those other comic characters for that other company!"

Doesn't hurt to kiss the boss' ass now and then, I guess.

And then we finally, finally get to the final pair of gags, on Day Six. Handsome actor Steve Amell is talking to a group of fans—I don't watch Arrow, so I didn't recognize him with his shirt on until the dialogue offered a clue as to who he was—while a security detail that looks like Secret Service keep them at bay. Harley charges through the crowd, screaming about how she simply has to get this guy to sign her autograph book and when Amell offers, she pushes him aside to approach, "Bruce Timm! My hero!" She fawns over Timm and Paul Dini, her creators, before trying to get her hands on a copy of Batman Adventures #12, her own first comic book appearance.

The dealer will sell it to her for "about three hundred bucks," which, wait, is that how much those are going for? Because I'm pretty sure I've got one in a long box in the tomb-like structure of longboxes in my ancestral home. Do I really have a comic book that might actually be worth some amount of money?

I hope so. This Harley Quinn special, on the other hand? I wouldn't all it "worthless," as there are a few gags that land, there's some great art, and it offers the always welcome opportunity to see Paul Pope and Damion Scott in action, but it's not what I'd call a fine comic book.

Or even a Very Good or Good one. Maybe Fair/Good...? Or Fair? Let's go with Fair/Good.

Good God, that's some chutzpah.

The above is a two-panel sequence from this week's Harley Quinn Invades Comic-Con International San Diego #1, a new one-shot by regular writing team of the surprise-hit Harley Quinn monthly series, Amanda Conner and Jimmy Palmiotti (the issue is drawn jam-issue style by nine different artists, although the above panels come from artist Dave Johnson's pages).

The premise of the comic, in brief, is that that Harley and her supporting cast are visiting CCI to sell merch, and she is using the opportunity to shop her portfolio of sample pages around (she's created a comic book character called Hurl Girl, which Conner draws). In punchline of the above joke is apparently that DC's direct market and superhero IP rival Marvel Entertainment doesn't pay as well as DC does (I guess...? It's one of the many inside baseball jokes that are so inside I think you actually have to work for DC to get, appreciate or care about them), and, of course, that "They," which would be Marvel, "aren't looking for anything new or original."

That hopefully good-natured slam comes in a comic book about a once-serious violent psychopathic comic book character now played for laughs invading a comic book convention (as in Keith Giffen, Alan Grant and Kevin O'Neill's 1993 Lobo Convention Special #1), a character created by in 1992 by Paul Dini and Bruce Timm, and currently being used in her second ongoing series by Conner and Palmiotti as DC's answer to Deadpool, a crazy, anarchic character who hears voices, frequently breaks the fourth wall, and is portrayed as silly and comedic in her own book, but seriously outside her own title.

Excusing the fact that DC's current editorial strategy is re-do and re-mix pre-existing characters, costumes and even stories as part of their New 52 initiative, I think it's worth noting the recent bibliograpies of the writers making fun of Marvel's unwillingness to try something "new" and "original."

Conner's most recent work for DC prior to co-writing and providing covers for Harley Quinn was working on a prequel to Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' 1986 Watchmen, over the very loud and very vociferous objections of the original author, featuring Moore and Gibbons creations inspired by superhero characters from the 1960s, created by a bunch of other creators.

The much more prolific Palimiotti's recent output for DC has consisted mainly of a very long run with co-writer Justin Grey on Tony DeZuniga and John Albano's 1972 Jonah Hex character, which, as it neared its cancellation, included a Booster Gold/Hex team-up that followed the pairing of the characters by Geoff Johns and Jeff Katz in 2007 and a Hex-thrown-into-his-future storyline that followed the same premise that Michael Fleisher-written Hex series from 1985.

He and Gray also wrote a bunch of miniseries based on Grant Morrison's reimaginings of the Golden Age Freedom Fighters characters and took over the Batwing title starring a legacy version of Morrison's re-creation of a black Batman originally conceived by Frank Robbins and Dick Giordano from a 1973 issue of Batman. They are currently writing a character dubbed "G.I. Zombie," whose name echoes that of the 1962-created Robert Kanigher co-created character G.I. Robot, and who is a monster serving in the military, like the characters of J.M. DeMatteis/Pat Broderick 1980-created Creature Commandos.

It's also a fucking zombie comic. Launched in 2014.

I'd like to think that Conner and Palmiotti were being ironic in their Marvel diss, that they were lampooning DC and themselves rather than taking a crack at their main competitors, as a quick survey of the output of the two publishers features a very, very, very wide gulf in terms of quality, originality, relevance, vitality and, of course, variety. DC mostly publishes New 52 comics which, with few exceptions, all look alike and share a very similar tone, whereas Marvel's output includes incredibly quirky books like a Mike Allred-drawn Silver Surfer, that All-New Ghost Rider, a superhero-humor-comic-that-is-actually-funny She-Hulk, sad-sack super-crime comedy The Superior Foes of Spider-Man, and books like Hawkeye, Daredevil, Moon Knight and Ms. Marvel.

I don't want to get into a Marvel vs. DC thing here, but Conner and Palmiotti apparently do, and for anyone at DC to be trying to troll Marvel in 2014 for being adverse to anything new and original is, well, crazy-sounding.

Like I said, I would like to think they weren't serious, but those panels immediately follow this weird-ass one, in which Palmiotti and Conner have Dan DiDio making fun of the frequent (constant?) complaints from fans and ex-DC creators that DC is just way too involved in dictating stories and interfering in the creative process in a way that is weird, random, unwelcome and unproductive and, obviously, usually results in pretty shitty comics:

I think the DiDio in the comic is meant to be making fun of the idea of letting creators go crazy and do what they want on their books, but that actually sounds kind of awesome, doesn't it?

The reason DC doesn't do that, DiDio's avatar seems to say, is that they won't sell more than a thousand units, which seems pretty contrary to much of the available evidence of auteur-style/creator-driven comics in the direct market that outsell a great deal of DC's output (Walking Dead, Saga, anything written by Mark Millar no matter how terrible it is), the general success of Marvel's current editorial model in relation to that of DC's (which almost always has a greater share of the market than DC's comics, and produces many more positive reviews) and even in-[DC's]house evidence, with DC's consistently best-selling comic being the one where Scott Snyder and Greg Capullo do whatever they want with Batman, and other outliers like Geoff Johns' Green Lantern franchise or Grant Morrison's Batman Inc being exempted from "New 52" continuity, save for a costume-tweaking here or there.

They're pretty damn weird jokes to be sharing a page, with creators Conner and Palmiotti arguing in favor of strict editorial control of books and that sales are the best metric of success in one panel, and then arguing in the next to panels that Marvel isn't willing to try new and original ideas like DC is.

I hope to discuss the book further and at greater length in the near future, when I get some time to review-review it, but, in the meantime, I wanted to at least stop and point at the unbelievable chutzpah of the Conner/Palmiotti writing team. This doesn't seem to be a case of the pot calling the kettle black so much as the pot calling the good china black.