Harley Quinn #75 // Review
Harlene Quinzel has been going through a hell of a lot in the pages of her own title. It's been strange, It's been confusing, but all good things must come to an end. And well...to be honest, everything else has to come to an end as well. So it is that a certain clown girl ends the run of her current series in Harley Quinn #75. Writer Sam Humphries reaches the end of his run with Harley in a big 38-page multi-story series finale drawn by Sami Basri, Nicola Scott, Emanuela Lupacchino, and Ray McCarthy, Ramon Villalobos, Ngozi Ukazu, Joe Quinones and Riley Rossmo.
Harley has awoken tied to a chair. She's being roasted in a ceremony, hosted by a fully anthropomorphized Bernie the Beaver. The roast is attended entirely by many different incarnations of her. In the process of being forced to hear stories about herself (which are all drawn by different people), Harley just might learn a little something about herself. From her brief, tragic tenure with the Super Friends in the late 1970s/early 1980s to her plan to sell Butt Nuggets on Coney Island and more the brief stories cover a lot of ground. The issue wraps-up with a Joker War story with Harley pulling herself from the brink of death, and into the rest of the crossover.
Humphries set himself up for a very, very difficult ending here. Harley had already been through cosmic adventures to bizarre moments, breaking the fourth wall to a very strange murder/mystery adventure on the West Coast. It's a lot to try to wrap-up in a single- coherent finale. Thankfully, Humphries doesn't exactly try to be terribly final about this finale. The roast of Harley feels like a feverish funhouse journey through Harley's psyche with comedy, drama, and at least one serious moment of sadness mixed up in a book with a surprisingly endearing ending that hits prior to the big crossover closer for the whole series. Humphries DOES give his own view of Harley one last moment before the crossover closes-out the issue. In a way, that last moment with Humphries' Harley is pretty satisfying. A balloon is released. It's her birthday. Then one page later, she's drowning in the Joker War, and things launch into adventures beyond Harley's own title.
The distinctive Sami Basri look that has come to define Harley's title serves as an interstitial roast that connects all the many stories of the issue. Basri didn't go out of his way to populate the roast with different pre-established versions of Harley. It might have been fun to see a perfect rendering of the original animated version of the character sitting next to a photo-realistic rendering of Margot Robbie, who would be sitting next to a version of Harley taken directly from the new animated series and so on. Basri DOES deliver a nice bit of wistful drama at the end of the issue's heavier aspects. The rest of the art ranges widely from the detailed, gritty linework of Ramon Villalobos, the clean, wistful emotionality of Ngozi Ukazu (who, next to Basri, does the some of the best work in the whole issue.) Rossmo's art's rubbery goodliness serves the Joker War crossover quite well as Harley spends the entire issue-end story recovering from near-death and drowning. The cheesy pasts of Rossmo's art are uniquely suited to Harley's psychological state's dripping anger at the end of the issue.
Humphries saw this issue coming for quite a long time, and so he'd had quite a bit of time in which to put it together. The overall feel of it feels more or less right. It would have been nice for Humphries to have had a bit more time to develop the gradual road to redemption that Harley seemed to be navigating throughout his run. This feels like a sudden tumble to an end and another beginning for Harley. One series ends, but the show MUST go on.
