Knight Terrors: Harley Quinn #1 // Review
Dr. Harleen Quinzel is reporting for work at Arkham Asylum. She’s ready to get down to the business of helping the criminally insane improve and recover from their various psychoses and things. But there’s something that’s not quite right about it. Maybe it’s the fact that she’s there wearing a lab coat, boxer shorts and mismatched socks. Maybe it’s the voice that’s speaking to her in Knight Terrors: Harley Quinn #1. Writer Tini Howard opens a two-issue mini-series featuring a clown girl exploring the strange realm of her own nightmares with artist Hayden Sherman and colorist Triona Farrell.
The voice doesn’t really bother her until it says the wrong thing. Then Harley gets a bit upset. And that’s when they attack: a whole bunch of different Jokers who all look slightly different. (Okay...some of them look REALLY different.) It’s upsetting...partially because she’s had a rough history with that particular piece of technicolor scum, but MOSTLY because it’s just kind of...uncreative. One would have expected more from the nightmare world of someone like Harley. And no one would be more disappointed about this sort of thing...than Harley. So she’s going to have to deal with the disappointment while she’s trapped in her own nightmares.
Howard has been working with Harley. Some of what she has delivered to the page has been interesting in different directions. However, this one seems a little bit more funny than her most recent encounters with the character. Harley‘s been all over the Multiverse in so many different ways in so many different comic books, written by so many different people. They’re really hard to do in a way that is new or original. However, applied to the nightmare crossover for the summer, Howard has managed to find a way to make it seem new. Howard correctly identifies the fact that Harley would be the one person who would be most easily capable of handling her own inner demons. She’s been wrestling with them more than any other character for a very long time. taking her from a group of jokers to some of the biggest villains in the history of the DC universe before landing her in front of a computer is just totally absurd in a way that’s very delicious.
The artist has a sketchy sense of humor. Every now and again, things jostle into page and panel in a way that’s absolutely gorgeous. One moment Harley is looking incredibly cute and the next moment she’s looking like something that got to do it all the bar napkin around closing time. It’s such a weird mutated fun house of a visual journey. It’s not something that would work really well for an extended period of time. However, have fun, a little too issue excursion like this can end-up being a lot of fun.
Running through things as quickly as Howard has it should be interesting to see where the second issue takes her. She’s been all over the place on a cosmic level and here she is inside of her own skull. Howard will pick up from this to issue, miniseries, and or launch Harley into further cosmic adventures in her own title. So she’s got a long journey ahead of her. This is an interesting opening to that journey.
