Overview: On the eve of Batman’s wedding, the Joker is abducted by Harley Quinn.
Synopsis (spoilers ahead): The story opens outside of an old warehouse where a couple street kids come across the Joker escaping from a water tank filled with human teeth. The Joker brushes himself off, only to be run over by a car driven by Harley Quinn, who then knocks the Joker unconscious.
The Joker wakes up tied in a tank as he is slowly drowning in a vat of pudding. The Joker frees himself and the two briefly fight, with Harley knocking the Joker back unconscious. The Joker wakes up chained to a chair as cartoonish characters are projected around him, and a large masked “Woodsman” named Truck behind him with an ax. Harley explains that she can’t permit the Joker to ruin the upcoming wedding and as she kisses the Joker on the forehead to say goodbye before Truck executes him, the Joker explains that he let himself be captured and Truck lowers his ax, obeying the Joker’s orders. Truck frees the Joker, who then promptly kills him, and the Joker and Harley fight again, with the Joker knocking Harley out with the blunt end of the ax. The Joker walks outside into an alley to find a gun in a dumpster, and the issue ends with the Joker walking towards the church leading to the events in Batman #48.
Analysis: This issue is the last in this series of lead-ups to the wedding in Batman #50, this time featuring anti-hero Harley Quinn trying to prevent the Joker from ruining Batman and Catwoman’s wedding. The issue clips along at a fast pace and makes efficient use of the twenty pages of story that it has to work with.
Harley Quinn is a character that I tend to have mixed feeling about. I’ve always loved the character going back to her animated series roots. I’ve always liked the twisted “romance” between Harley and the Joker and it’s been interesting to see how the character has evolved over the last few years. As much as I like the early stories like Mad Love, it is a little problematic to have a major, marketable character essentially be a victim of horrific domestic violence at the hands of the Joker, so I understand and enjoy that she has evolved since that time. Where the mixed feelings come in is that I’m not huge on the idea of Harley Quinn as DC’s answer to Deadpool which is why I tend to avoid a lot of her silly solo adventures (as a side note, my new favorite Harley Quinn is the version that we met in Sean Gordon Murphy’s brilliant White Knight).
This brings us to this issue, which features the modern take of Harley that I do enjoy reading, a Harley Quinn that has lived through years of traumatizing abuse and come out the other side of it, a survivor. I like that her feelings towards the Joker seem to remain complicated and that she’s not acting out of rage so much as she is out of necessity. The Joker pollutes and corrupts everything that he touches and this Harley seems to feel the weight of having lived with that corruption and seems to feel that it is too late for her, she’s willing to do whatever is necessary to give someone else a shot at a happy ending. It’s an interesting notion and I buy her motivations for going after the Joker. I also enjoyed the nods to Mad Love with Harley’s love of elaborate death traps, which leads to some interesting set pieces throughout the story.
As for the Joker, as always, he turns out to be one step ahead of Harley’s plans, and its fitting that the turns the tables on her. I liked Truck’s turn in the issue, as well as Joker making the case for Harley one day reasoning that she belongs back with the Joker, which I think is a very interesting fear for this version of the character.
I do find the Joker to be a bit aimless in this issue and I don’t quite get why the Joker justifies letting himself be captured by Harley to regain some sort of focus. I also think the Joker randomly discovering a pistol in a dumpster and stumbling off to the church to be a clumsy tie into Batman #48-49. I think it would be a better story if there was a pay off to the Joker tipping off various other villains about the wedding, but that doesn’t continue with this issue.
Sami Basri handles the art chores of this issue well. This is my first exposure to Basri’s work and I like what I see. I particularly enjoyed the character work with Harley, and the death trap sequences were well done. Otto Schmidt concludes the “epilogue” with the last few pages and while they are very well done (I’ve yet to see anything drawn by Schmidt I didn’t enjoy, I do wonder what the point was in having the epilogues drawn by someone else.
Final Thoughts: These wedding prelude issues have been very hit or miss for me, but I enjoyed this issue and thought it was an interesting progression for Harley Quinn’s character. Now on to the wedding.
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