After a playful, adventurous break for another installment of Gotham City Sirens, your favorite psycho psychiatrist is back to continue smashing the achingly modern twin threats of Unrequited Love and Gentrification.
While baking pies for the upcoming Throatcutter hill neighborhood block party, asks her neighbors (as well as her possible-hallucination floating external brain) for advice on her sworn-enemy/overwhelming-crush situation with Sexy but Evil real estate mogul Althea Klang. The conversation is quickly interrupted, however, by this month’s latest mech-suit villain, a sonic-boom powered foe named, funnily enough, Clang. This is all bookended by flashes of the Gunbuddies and Ravasher’s bickering and brainstorming on how best to fulfill Althea Klang’s mission of taking Harley Quinn down.
For the reader’s experience, Harley Quinn’s defining characteristic is her voice. You know it when you see it— it can be manic, confident, or plucky. It’s always delightfully cartoonish, and any writer who takes her on is going to live or die by the command and consistency they display in Harley’s voice. Eliot Kalan clearly demonstrates a firm grasp of their incarnation of HQ’s signature verbosity.
But when you put a couple of supporting characters in a small kitchen with Harley, you are. Also (obviously) putting the reader in that same room, and you run the structural risk of that reader reaching for a bottle of aspirin before the obligatory monthly fight scene.
And when that fight scene does come around, it’s against the same sort of supervillain-ified concept of modern urban living/investment capitalism. It’s a kind of thematic repetitiveness which is starting to feel like it would have been more successful at home in some sort of “Harley Smashes Urban Capitalism” miniseries. Publishing could have taken these villains— all of which are genuinely funny, if unimaginatively designed— and team them up for Harley to take on in one fell swoop. As fodder for the ongoing, however, it’s just not quite working.
More on Harley Quinn’s voice: the structural problems I mentioned above still can lead to some genuinely laugh-out-loud moments which win points back for Kalan and keep things comedically afloat. For instance, Harley and her jilted-lover/DJ-neighbor/one-off sidekick smash down a door in dramatic fashion only to have Harley bemoan how “they just don’t make doors like they used to”. It’s classic HQ and works on multiple levels: it’s an effective quip and also subtly underscores the theme of this maddening era of techno-speculative investment capitalism supplanting urban pragmatism; the door in question is the front door of a startup tech flop house.
This issue and this series is a mess that is not cleaning itself up anytime soon. The stakes feel middling at best, the art feels slapdash and hurried, and the personal dramas interlaced with the comedic tones leave things feeling like the creative team is simply spinning their wheels. It’s enough to make this reviewer wonder if Harley Quinn even needs her own ongoing. I know that sounds harsh, and maybe it is. But that’s how much work this book has to do in order to win me back.
Recommend if…
- You’re tired of the noise in your neighborhood
- You’re tired of startup culture infecting our cities
- You’re tired in general.
Overall: Though the premise of this run is admirable and inventive, the operative word around Throatcutter hill lately is “uninspired.” I simply can’t imagine who is picking this up every single month. If you are, hello. Great to have you.
Score: 5/10
English (US) · 