Harley Quinn 30th Anniversary Special (2022) #1

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Dark Crisis: Young Justice continues to look at the history of the team and how that interacts with the characters we know and love today, for better or for worse. I’m sad that the reveal in this issue was spoiled by solicits because it’s a fun idea that I wouldn’t have seen coming had they not put it there. I want to start off by saying that I appreciate the thought of pairing various writers and artists who worked on previous Harley Quinn books for this anthology. It could be seen as a trip down memory lane for some. Moreover, I do think that Chad Hardin is a good artist for this story. His character designs are colorful and expressive. I also like how letterer Dave Sharpe gave certain characters are given differently designed speech bubbles (like Red Tool) to make it all more fun.

The artwork was a bit inconsistent, too. I liked the moodier blue and yellow colors used in the story, but some of Harley’s faces looked garbled and weird. Sometimes her body appeared to be a bit “box-like” as well. It gave me the sense of rushed work. 4/10 To celebrate 30 years of Harley Quinn, Warner Bros. Consumer Products, DC and Palm NFT Studio are releasing a new NFT collection dedicated to the Clown Princess of Crime. These collectibles will grant access to exclusive experiences as part of Harley’s crew. This free collection of 30,000 Harley Quinn NFTs will drop over two days, starting on September 29 at 9am PST, with early access for DC Bat Cowl Collection holders. The snapshot determining eligibility for early access will be taken on September 28, at 9am PST. On September 30 at 9am PST, open mint for all DC NFT account holders will begin. To learn more about the Harley Quinn collection, please visit nft.dcuniverse.com. By 1999, it was clear that Harley added something truly unique to Gotham City. The only problem was that something was missing from mainstream continuity. That changed when the still highly-read Batman: Harley Quinn #1 was published as part of the Bat-Family’s yearlong “No Man’s Land” storyline, establishing Harleen’s place in the DCU. Dini, Harley’s co-creator, once again wrote the script, giving her an origin that was pretty similar to the one she had in the animated series. In the process, the comic also set up her friendship with Poison Ivy and her toxic relationship with the Joker. Harley Quinn was finally canon and Gotham City was a better place for it. (Well, for anyone who wasn’t one of her victims.) That said, if you’ve read one Jimmy Palmiotti Harley story, you’ve read them all. His dialogue for Harley can only be described as overdone baby talk, where there are so many intentionally misspelled words and speech inflections, it’s absolutely unreadable. What makes this worse is that this story is wall-to-wall with this dialogue taking up so many of the panels. I found myself tempted to skip over it multiple times before forcing myself to try to discern everything that was being said.It was not long before my hype dissipated into disappointment, before I felt a sensation inside me that I have not felt towards any comic I’ve reviewed in my time at Batman News: anger. Not just regular anger, but Gordon Ramsey on a bad day at Hell’s Kitchen kind of anger. Then comes a vignette where Harley and Ivy are lovers going against the Penguin (There are a couple of good lines in this particular story about Harley's "poor trigger discipline.") Another story shows the pre-Joker Harleen Quinzel who solves a murder by using her expertise in toxicology to discover that Poison Ivy is the murderer. I wasn't aware that Quinn was gay or a toxicology expert, but the volume is filled with alternate reality stories--including some where Harley is killed by a brain bomb and the majority of the vignette is her imagining that she survived, another where she is a character in a dungeons & dragons type scenario, etc. A few months later, on January 18 th, 1993, viewers witnessed the beginning of a beautiful relationship. Batman: The Animated Series paired Harley Quinn with Poison Ivy in an episode appropriately titled “Harley and Ivy.” The rest is history.

Amanda then moved on to do what is probably one of her best known works. She did several years as penciller on the hit series “Vampirella” for Harris Comics and drafted 24 issues. While illustrating “Vampirella”, Amanda worked with the top writers in the field, Grant Morrison, Mark Millar and Warren Ellis. In 2013, NetherRealm Studios released the video game Injustice: Gods Among Us. The fighting game from the minds behind the Mortal Kombat series would go on to spawn a franchise that included a sequel game, a popular comic series and a 2021 animated film. There isn’t much plot to the chapter itself, it’s just Harley traveling through a circus that represents various moments of her life and relationships in a surreal fashion. It’s still not great, and I absolutely did not need another sequence praising how wonderful the Harley/Ivy romance is after what I’ve been exposed to in this comic. Still, I would probably put Mindy Lee and the Dodsons on the list of who should actually be writing Harley. It took us ten stories to find a creative team still capable of that. 8/10Cover image for 0722DC025 Harley Quinn 30th Anniversary Special #1 Jerome Opena Cover, by (W) Various (A) Various (CA) Jerome Opena, in stores Tuesday, September 20, 2022 from DC Comics

Letterers: Dave Sharpe, Josh Reed, Pat Brosseau, Deron Bennett, Tom Napolitano, Saida Temofonte, and Clayton Cowles Here, we finally get a story where Harley Quinn is written as herself. Mindy Lee and Terry Dodson are writing Harley’s voice better than even Paul Dini here because they are not trying to mimic the vapidness of the newer version. She’s got that 1940’s Brooklyn gangster twang to her voice, but it’s not overdone to the point where it’s annoying. The artwork also depicts Harley with a cute, yet sassy expression that matches her character. The art by John Timms is wonderful, though. The action is incredibly well drawn and intense, and I appreciated the minor visual jokes like Harley stealing a bag that says “LOOT” or an Easter egg of the Joker as a homeless clown. 6/10 Synopsis for "The Last Harley Story" This article is a stub. You can help DC Database by expanding it.

Then there’s the plot itself, which shows Harley trying to hang out with Alfred, and they have long conversations before Harley helps Alfred fight some villains. I was questioning in my head the whole time why Alfred was allowing a crazy person with a murder record to drink tea with him and caper about Wayne Manor, even if she is supposed to be reformed. But that’s another element to Palmiotti’s Harley. He changes anything from DC canon at will to fit his story. This has caused confusion over his run for years as people couldn’t figure out if it was supposed to be canon or not.