Written by Rob Williams

Art by Jim Lee and Sean “Cheeks” Galloway

Inked by Scott Williams, Sandra Hope and Richard Friend

Coloured by Alex Sinclair and Sean “Cheeks” Galloway

Lettered by Travis Lanham

In anticipation of the blockbuster film being released this month as well as the bi-weekly Suicide Squad title to follow, DC have released this free 30 page prelude featuring Harley Quinn. And because I’m an ungrateful little wretch with precious little else to do, I thought I’d tell you why this issue has left a lot to be desired.

After a two year break from comics, I was surprised to find Rob Williams writing one of the key books in DC’s line-wide relaunch. With the greatest respect, I’ve always found Williams to be one of those middling writers; occasionally capable of great work, once or twice cranking out some utter garbage, but most of the time, just content to sit in the middle, and produce solid but unremarkable stories on titles like Dark Wolverine. The work I saw on this issue suggests both an improvement and an utter regression.

On the one hand, there is something immediately more exciting and “sexy” about his writing in this issue. Admittedly, Harley Quinn is more fun to write than Daken, the unwanted bastard child of the Marvel Universe Wolverine, but nonetheless, the first couple of pages brim with fun one-liners and meta jokes that I wouldn’t usually expect from Williams. In fact, the humour is more akin to Deadpool than a book featuring Harley Quinn. There’s a lot of winking at the audience. When Harley Quinn wakes up from a blackout in a therapist’s office, she sighs “If this is a dream sequence, I’m gonna feel really cheated.” This kind of meta-referencing was fresh ten years ago, but now it’s almost a form of lampshading to account for lazy or inconsistent storytelling.

You see, once you get past the fun Harley dialogue, and the narration captions that make fun of narration in superhero comics, you’re left with a very nonsensical and unsatisfying story. The plot (a word used in the loosest of senses) entails Harley being enlisted via shady letter in Evil Anonymous, a group that supposedly wants to rehabilitate supervillains. From there, Harley tracks the Man-Bat and jumps on top of him mid-rampage, trying to psycho-analyse him as they weave and duck out of traffic and police. The Man-Bat joyride leaves Harley with a concussion and after blacking out, she finds herself in a therapists office, counselling super-villains who want to reform their ways. From this synopsis you can guess that Harley’s new career path ISN’T WHAT IT SEEMS and that someone is manipulating Harley from behind the scenes.

In the same way Watchmen was responsible for the birth of a million terrible “grim ‘n’ gritty” superhero stories, Christopher Nolan has a lot to answer for judging by the amount of bad “it was all in their head!” twists you find in stories these days. But while Nolan structures his scripts with careful pacing and foreshadowing, most writers see the POV of a unreliable narrator as a get out of jail card for confusing, slapdash stories that jump from one scene to the next. “You fools!”, they might cry, “I’m adopting the perspective of a mentally unhinged individual! The disjointed and confusing narrative is a device in order to capture their subjective reality!”. And yet this story feels more like the writer throwing shit at a wall and seeing what sticks, safe in the knowledge that they’ll be forgiven due to the manic nature of their protagonist. After a battle with the Justice League that shoehorns a shamelessly lazy and unearned motivation for Harley joining the squad, the climactic reveal of just what is going on in Harley’s head unfolds, and the reader accepts it with a shrug. After all, it makes just as much sense as any of the random crap preceding it.

Art-wise, Jim Lee’s work is the same as its been for the last decade and a half, packed with energy, detail and dramatic compositions (there’s at least four or five panels that here that could be blown up and used as pin ups). You don’t hire Jim Lee on a book for atmosphere or particularly interesting designs; he’s there to draw scantily clad men and woman flying around and beating the crap out of each other in the most dynamic, eye-catching manner possible and in that sense he delivers. The Man-Bat rampage is a very fun sequence and there’s an encounter between Harley and Batman near the end of the book that Lee milks for maximum impact.

Sean Galloway’s Saturday-morning cartoon style suits the section in which Harley finds herself playing therapist to supervillians. It’s a very cutesy, pleasing style akin to old Powerpuff Girls episodes, and it initially distracts from the quickly derailing story. Galloway could have served his art better with slightly brighter colours as opposed to the dark purples and greens we got but overall, it’s some very vibrant and endearing pages.

Both artists struggle from slight storytelling problems in their segments; characters and objects move between panels in an awkward manner that causes the reader to double back to process what they’ve read. It feels more like a scripting issue than anything to do with the artists themselves, as Williams dictates the blocking of the characters in whatever way will get him to the end of the page and onto that next big money shot for Lee.

Of course, the cynical way to look at this issue is to say “hey, it’s a freebie! Williams is probably saving the good stuff for the book people are gonna have to pay for.” That’s fair to a certain extent, but ultimately there’s enough lazy meta-jokes, enough nonsensical plotting and enough thinly sketched character motivations in this issue to cause concern for the upcoming title. Alas, while we won’t know for sure until the book launches later this month, one thing we can guarantee is this; Jim Lee draws Harley Quinn riding the Man-Bat as a surfboard like an absolute professional.