The scary death metal Harley. The Harley Who Laughs. She’s the one who has been making all kinds of problems for Harleen. She’s finally teamed up with her older self to try to defeat her, but things will be quite a bit more complicated than a simple slugfest in Harley Quinn #27. Writer Stephanie Phillips continues a fun, whimsical dramatic action comedy that is drawn by artists Matteo Lolli and David Baldeón with the aid of colorist Rain Beredo. Phillips has been all over the place with the scripting on the storyline of “Who Killed Harley?” The ending is less than appealing, but it’s been a fun journey anyway. 

There’s a reason why the Harley Who Laughs is the way that she is. Harley’s going to get to the bottom of why. She’s going to break the fourth wall a few times in the process. There WILL be combat, but she’s not interested in ending the whole thing in a big battle sequence. She knows that the story is coming to a close, and time is running out to make it feel suitably satisfying. She’ll try her best to make it work. With any luck, she might actually learn something along the way. 

Phillips has been so many places with Harley in the course of the story that it’s inevitable that the whole thing will be more or less unsatisfying in the end. Phillips allows Harley to be conscious enough of the fact that she’s in a comic book to make everything feel reasonably intriguing, but the weight of the tropes of a big multi-Earth crossover overwhelm everything. In the end, the inescapable gravity of the format crushes anything meaningful that the writer may be trying to develop.

Lolli and Baldeón do their best to keep the silliness of the overall premise from overwhelming a very real menace. There’s real aggression and emotion pouring off the page that Lolli and Baldeón move around quite efficiently as everything goes to its eventual conclusion. Each of the Harleys from each of the Earths seems well-defined, but there isn’t much that an artist could do to make much sense of the weird whimsy of Harley’s journey with herselves. It’s all sort of fun, but the visual reality of the story ends up oozing out into a kind of formlessness with the rest of the story by the end of the issue.

Phillips has good instincts for the chaos and the craziness that is Harley. She’s just not working with it in a way that would result in a well-framed plot. And maybe Harley doesn’t NEED a well-framed plot, but the series is always a lot more satisfying when there’s some kind of an eye on a steadier story construction than the one that Phillips has managed the past few issues. All of the right elements are clearly apparent in Phillips’s work, though. Given the right momentum, she could cast Harley in really fun new directions. 

Grade: C+