Harley is in the middle of a poker game when she tries to kill herself. It happens just exactly the way this sort of thing always does: she jumps through an interdimensional portal dressed as some kind of dark punk metal goddess looking to commit inter-dimensional homicidal suicide. Thus begins Harley Quinn #25. Writer Stephanie Phillips continues a fun tumble through Harley’s psyche in another chapter rendered for the page by the art team of Matteo Lolli and David Baldeón. Color comes to the page courtesy of Rain Beredo. Phillips’s multiple Harley journey might be fun, but the first issue in the latest story lacks depth.

It’s the future. Harley’s 50. A dark, homicidal Harley shoots through a portal and tries to kill her. Naturally, Old Lady Harley will run into the current Harley...the one who just came back from the dead. Now, Harley and Harley have to put their heads together to defeat their darker self and save all of the rest of the Harleys from across the multiverse. To do so, they will need to steal something from their semi-metal Hot Topic clone: the wrist-mounted hardware she’s using to hop from dimension to dimension. 

Phillips has clearly been leading in the direction of multi-Harley madness since she first started working on the series. Sadly, some of the momentum of a multi-Harley story has been stolen by a far more cleverly-framed Jessica Jones series that just ended earlier this month at Marvel. The insight that writer Gail Simone fused into Variants was much more intense than the meeting between three Harleys that happens in this issue. Phillips could still manage something of profound depth as the storyline continues in Harley Quinn #26, but Simone’s work felt more fluid and well-balanced in its opening chapter. 

Lolli and Baldeón are clearly having a lot of fun contrasting 50-year-old Harley against the contemporary version of herself. Not very many artists can manage the subtle nuance that comes with a middle-aged countenance over a younger version of the same character. Lolli and Baldeón do a really good job of manifesting that without exaggerating the differences. The nonverbal contrast between the two Harleys is like...90% of what makes this issue work as well as it does. Beredo’s color slickly defines a cool darkness with stylishly shadowy color. With three different versions of Harley dominating this chapter, there’s a hell of a lot of red, black, and chalk-white skin. Beredo does a really good job of varying it all enough to keep it from being a weird, lifeless, unengaging wallpaper of the three colors. 

The funhouse clown car of the final splash page is fun. It could mean good things for the next issue if everything comes together at the right angles, but it’s going to be really, really difficult to keep everything from feeling indistinct. It’s hard enough to keep every character distinct in a massive crossover issue. Doing so under the circumstances that Phillips is working with at the end of the 25th issue will be a real challenge.

Grade: B