Key findings
- Harley Quinn finally joined the DC Universe in 1999, almost 7 years after her debut in Batman: The Animated Series.
- Harley Quinn had an impressive comic book career before joining DC Universe, debuting in 1993’s Batman Adventures.
- Paul Dini kept the Mad Love origin for Harley Quinn’s introduction to the DC Universe and made some adjustments to fit the story.
In each flashback, we examine a comic book issue from 10/25/50/75 years ago (plus a wildcard with a fifth week each month). This time, we go to August 1999 to see when Harley Quinn finally joined the DC Universe.
One of my comics dictionary terms is the “snowball idea.” What this means is that once a comics idea is born, it rolls down the hill like a snowball, gaining mass and momentum until it’s too big to stop and the idea becomes reality. What I notice, however, are snowball ideas that obviously should have happened IMMEDIATELY, but still took MUCH longer than they should have.
I’m talking, of course, about how bizarrely long it took DC to introduce Harley Quinn into the DC Universe proper, which didn’t happen until August 1999, nearly SEVEN YEARS after Harley Quinn made her triumphant debut in Batman: The Animated Series. It seemed like such an obvious idea, and yet it wasn’t worked into the DC Batman comics until No Man’s Land, the year-long story about Gotham City being cut off from the rest of the world after a devastating earthquake (I covered the launch of No Man’s Land in a review earlier this year) in Batman: Harley Quinna one-shot comic written by Paul Dini and drawn by Yvel Guichet and Aaron Sowd.
What was Harley Quinn’s comic book history up to this point?
What’s interesting is that, despite not appearing in the DC Universe proper for years, Harley Quinn had a very impressive comic book career BEFORE she officially became part of the DC Universe. In fact, DC had a Batman Adventures comic book series that told comic book stories set in the animated series’ continuity, and Harley Quinn made her debut in THAT series in August 1993, in a story where she was teamed up with Poison Ivy.
In January 1994, not much longer after her comic book debut, Paul Dini and Bruce Timm decided to use the comic book format to tell Harley Quinn’s official origin in the graphic novel. Crazy Love (which I wrote about in a recap here). As I noted at the time, there’s an interesting thing about Harley’s origin that probably would never have been noticed if they had thought to make her more of an anti-hero. She’s a psychology major, but she apparently has sex with her teachers for the sake of her grades. That was certainly left out of her more recent origins…
Harley came to Arkham Asylum with the intention of capitalizing on the Joker by writing a book about him. Instead, he immediately attracted her…
The Joker then cleverly invented some dark stories to take Harley Quinn under his control and completely seduce her…
In the end, Harley decides to become Harley Quinn and free the Joker from his cell, and she becomes his henchman/lover…
What’s fascinating to me is that it doesn’t even seem like the Joker really thought that this specific outcome would happen, but rather he just decided to seduce her because he COULD, you know? It definitely sounds like something he would do, right?
Okay, so how was she written into the actual DC Universe?
How was Harley Quinn written into the DC Universe?
Dini basically kept her origin in Mad Love, only Harley is actually arrested after she is revealed to be the reason the Joker kept escaping from Arkham Asylum. As it turns out, it was the earthquake that freed her from her cell that cut the power and freed Harley sometime after No Man’s Land began…
She then decides to seek out the Joker and offer to become his partner/girlfriend. There is also a cute scene from Guichet and Sowd where she tries out different costumes before finally getting the iconic Harley Quinn look…
She introduces herself to the Joker and makes a pretty strong first impression. He accepts her love and attention and lets her join his gang. Over time, however, he obviously gets tired of her and lures her into a spaceship that is supposed to take her to her death…
In reality, the spaceship crashes on Posion Ivy’s territory. She is contractually bound not to attack the Joker’s interests, and so Harley Quinn is the perfect tool for her. She gives her a serum that gives Harley superpowers…
Harley then sets out to get revenge on the Joker, but of course all she needed was an apology from the Joker, so she forgave him and the two end the affair as a couple again…
The Alex Ross cover of this issue is quite famous in itself…
It’s fascinating to see how far she’s come from being just “The Joker’s girlfriend.”
If you have suggestions for September (or later) comics from 2014, 1999, 1974, and 1949 that you’d like me to spotlight, drop me a line at [email protected]! Here’s the guide to book cover dates, though, so you can suggest books that actually came out in the right month. Generally, the traditional time period between a comic’s cover date and release date was two months for most years of comics history (sometimes it was three months, but not during the time we’re discussing here). So the comics have a cover date that’s two months before the actual release date (so October for a book that came out in August). Of course, it’s easier to tell when a book from 10 years ago came out because there was coverage of the books on the internet at the time.
