Harley Screws Up the DCU #6 // Review
Harley feels kind of weird watching herself die. She tells herself that it’s pretty weird watching herself watch herself die, which is actually a really good point. Of course, things are only going to get more complicated now that the older sister that she never knew she needed is about to die in Multiversity: Harley Screws Up the DCU #6. Writer Frank Tieri and artist Logan Faerber deliver the final chapter of the weird little miniseries with a surprisingly clever climax. It might have been a rather long time in coming, but Tieri and Faerber manage a genuinely funny closer to their series.
Harley is dying. But Harley can’t stick around for it. She’s got things to do. Why? Well..she’s told her to do some things. And as it is her dying wish that these things get done, it’s the least she can do for herself. She’s not even going to question why she wants her to do these things. She’s just listening to herself and doing them. She doesn’t know why. It has to do with time travel and the fact that certain things have happened in a certain way. Before things can truly resolve, though, she’s going to have to come up with a better reason for doing things than the fact that “it happened that way.”
Tieri has taken about...4-5 issues longer to reach a resolution to this series than he should have. The big climactic conclusion is seriously funny in a whole bunch of different ways for a whole bunch of different reasons. Time travel comedy has been through a bewildering amount of complexity over the course of the past 20 years. (Even Harley has explored parallel timelines for comic effect in the recent past.) Somehow, Tieri manages to outdo just about everybody else who's attempted it in recent memory. The bizarrely hypnotic complexity of Tieri’s weirdness takes it all to a whole new level.
Faerber’s rubbery, cartoonish renderings end up fitting Tieri’s script like a weirdly comfortable glove of some sort. The exaggerations feel a bit uncomfortable in places. But so does the script. Above all, visual gags maintain the overall kinetics of the comedy even when the script is being reasonably serious for dramatic effect. There’s an equilibrium between the art and the script...the one never allows the other to take itself too seriously. Of the two components, the art is EASILY the sillier end of the issue, but there are moments where Faerber almost runs the risk of taking the silliness too seriously as well. And it’s just nice that Tieri can take it all into a weird direction to avoid any kind of crisis of semi-humorlessness when that happens.
Honestly, with things being the way they are, it wouldn't be that difficult to edit the entire six-issue series down into a much more pleasantly comical three-issue miniseries. While there is a hell of a lot of filler, there are quite a few moments scattered throughout the series that are actually pretty funny. This last issue, though? It's probably the best.
