The Harley Quinn Annual #1 comic book, on sale October 29, will be a "scratch 'n sniff" comic with scents of leather, suntan lotion, and pizza, plus one unnamed scent of a "mysterious compound." Those smells will be in the U.S. edition; a second variant edition that will be available in all territories features the same smells with the exception of the mysterious compound, which will be replaced with fresh-cut grass.

Due to legal reasons, DC Comics is promoting this as a "Rub-and-Smell" comic instead of "scratch 'n sniff," but whatever you call it, it's hard to remember the last time a major publisher did an old school gimmick like this. With Harley Quinn becoming more comedic and self-aware than ever thanks to writers Amanda Conner and Jimmy Palmiotti, her series seems prime for such comic book hijinks.The comic will feature four different covers -- a regular cover and Bombshell variant for the U.S. edition (pictured below), and then an international variant cover. It will be completed by a team of artists including John Timms, Paul Mounts, Stjepan Sejic, Joe Quinones, Ben Caldwell, Rico Renzi, Kelley Jones, and Michelle Madsen.We had a chat with Conner and Palmiotti, who gave us the run down on Harley Quinn Annual #1 and all of its smelly glory. Hear what they had to say, then let us know your thoughts in the comments.

I think DC was bouncing around the idea at the end of the year.Jimmy just mentioned it as a joke, and I think it got taken seriously -- and here we are. [Laughs]Yeah, I don't know why -- probably some kids' book or something. You know, we said, "You know the scratch-and-sniff? What if they did that in comics?" All of a sudden, it magically happens.Well, most of the book is not going to take place in Coney Island, Brooklyn, which is one of the smelliest places I know -- and that's not a bad thing because Brooklyn has a lot of good smells. But most of it takes place in Gotham.Yeah, the basic story is Poison Ivy has been thrown in Arkham Asylum, and Harley gets word that she's in there and decides that she's going to break her out. So the smells kind of work within the story. Since we have the whole breakout and why Ivy was brought there in the first place, and then we have a lot of different sequences, the cool thing about the story is that it kind of goes off to little places here and there. Although John Timms is drawing the book -- we have a bunch of artists drawing doing different scenes in the book, and it actually makes sense to the story we're presenting. So like Harley usually is, it's a very crazy story that makes sense in her head and hopefully to the readers.Okay. Well, when Harley first goes to break Ivy out of jail, she's wearing the Bombshell costume that she wears.That was created by Ant Lucia.Yeah, and you get to rub her leather outfit and smell leather. [Laughs] You don't want to give away too much, but I guess it's for people who want that extra thing you can do with your comic. So we have that, and then we have several recurring smells.I don't know who doesn't love the smell of suntan lotion, so we're opting for the that. What was the third one?We have the smell of pizza.Oh, pizza, of course!And that makes sense with the story.Yeah, and we all know that Harley loves to eat, so it would make total sense for pizza to be one of the smells.Then the pizza smell repeats itself, literally. So there's a lot of that going on. The story is a lot more about the story. The smell is the extra fun thing to do, but there's actually a full-blown story in there, 38 pages.Yeah, you get to use three of your senses instead of just two. You see, feel and sniff it.Yeah -- and you should do it in the privacy of your own home. [Laughs] Otherwise, you might get strange looks.You'll make comic book store owners angry.Some of the smells were more subtle than other smells, and we didn't want to be too subtle. You know, Harley is not a subtle character at all. So we didn't get approved or disapproved on any smells except for the ones that we picked. You know, we decided on the ones that had the most impactful scents. We even got approved on one really, really surprising one -- if you want to take that one, Jimmy.No, I don't! Anyway, we went through, like, 40 different scents, and the hard thing about this is that we have to write a story and we have to figure out how smell works into the story. Then there's also, "Well, now they can only place the smell in certain places in the story." So we kind of had to write the book around the smells. It was probably the hardest book that we've ever written.Yeah, it was so difficult. That was an arduous task, this book.Yeah, again, because of the placement and printing and positioning. You couldn't have a smell cross with another smell on a page.Because then they'd contaminate each other.Yeah, just think about the idea of a leather pizza smell. [Laughs] So there's a lot of little things to it. It's so funny, I think at one point they said it was created in the spirit of innovation, and I was just laughing at that. I don't know why that was so funny to me.I mean, it could be thought of as a gimmick, but the important thing that we were thinking was that, in order to justify the gimmick, we wanted to put a really fun story behind it. So even without the smells you would still really enjoy the story; that was really the important thing.I don't really care if people go out there and say the book stinks. [Laughs] But if they're fans of Harley Quinn, they're gonna want this, because it has everything to do with the regular series as well, even though it's a standalone story. If they're fans of great comic books, we have John Timms doing the bulk of the book, and then we have separate little scenes done by different artists like Ben Caldwell and Joe Quinones and Kelley Jones and Stjepan Sejic. So have we have a variety of art, and it looks amazing.It's a fun story, and it just has the added thing of smell. If it was just standalone, just a book of smells, let's say -- first of all, we would have just called it that: The Book of Smells. But there's a lot more to it; there's a great adventure, and we have Harley teamed up with Ivy fighting some bad guys. They make friends, they kick people's butts -- it's a little bit of everything in the book. The comic alone is worth it I think for people, and I think the smell is just another crazy thing to do, and it kind of works with the character of Harley, because you don't ever know what to expect next.Gee, I don't know! [Laughs][Laughs] You lick the comic? You know, we had to be careful where we put the rubbing parts. It was tempting to do crazy stuff in the book. I guess that's going to be whatever technology's out there! We're willing to try. I think it's always fun when something's done like this because, on some level, it is this wonderful, bizarro thing to do and yet, if there's something out there, we should definitely try it if it fits the character. I mean, we wouldn't have done this if it didn't fit Harley. I don't think a Jonah Hex scratch-and-sniff book would have worked.[Laughs] They didn't have a horse manure smell.Or even Batman, you know? It's like, "Smell the damp cave smells!" But with Harley it kind of makes sense. The scents kind of make sense in the book. We kind of push the envelope with some of the smells a little bit. We have a mysterious compound that we feature in the regular book, in the variant, that Ivy created. So the international edition actually has a different scent from the one in the US. So there's a little bit of craziness involved with this book -- but again it fits the character. We expect this from Harley.Let's just say we didn't want to alarm the dogs at customs.Yeah, the scent in the United States is a lot easier to produce.You know, you did remind me of one smell that got flat-out rejected.What was that?The burnt smell.Yeah, they had a burnt smell, but it smelled like a burnt house.And we were going to use it for her taxidermic beaver that she has. They were like, "Yeah, no." [Laughs]Remember, Amanda brought that up, not me. That's all Amanda. I'm always the bad guy here, so...You know, Jimmy, I thought you went looking for some -- and I remember there being movies where they had scratch 'n sniff cards.Yeah, John Waters did one. I didn't find any comics. That doesn't mean there aren't any out there, but I couldn't find any scratch 'n sniff comics. Some of my comics smell of old paper, and that's not really a selling tool. You know, I'm sure somebody in the comments will go, "Oh my God, you don't remember this comic from 1944?" I just haven't been able to find one. Now, children's books, I know, do it, and I think years ago they also had a series of books -- and I have yet to find them -- where it had the smells of an era. So you could buy the '60s, and it had scratch-and-sniff smells of different things from the '60s. But I've never seen it in a comic book.Well, we were scratching everything. Amanda and I spent the day and just scratched everything that we saw. [Laughs] No, no, what we did was we had a pile of these scents on cards. As we were looking at him, we were scratching them to see if we could guess what they were, and then look at it and see if it matched it. That was important for us, that the actual smell matched what it was -- because some of the things didn't line up very well -- we thought, and I guess everybody smells things differently a little bit, but that was our research. We had our choices and looked through our smells, and then we got to writing. [Laughs]Pretty much!Smells aside, it's a really fun Harley issue. It's 38 pages of complete madness. It's a lot of fun. Having the scents on it just adds another dimension of bizarreness and fun to it. I think when you read this digitally you're not going to lose too much out of it.Yeah, we made it so that people who buy it on their tablets and stuff won't really be missing out too much.No, but it will be fun, and every once in awhile you can pull a comic out of your box, take it out, and smell it! Maybe have a bag of chips afterwards, you know?Let's just say the fans who get it will have a rubbing good time! [Laughs]

Joshua is IGN’s Comics Editor. If Game of Thrones, Spider-Man, or Super Smash Bros. are frequently used words in your vocabulary, you’ll want to follow him on Twitter and IGN