Letterer Gabriela Downie does excellent work telling the story while staying out of the art's way.Īdditionally, his art is beautiful, with many panel designs that visually show the dichotomy between characters, particularly Harleen and Joker. Aside from pretty men and women, Šejić also does a great job conveying the inner lives of these characters, from Dent's madness and rage to Gordon's exasperated exhaustion. Harley herself is pretty darn foxy as well, which isn't a surprise if you've seen any of Šejić's other work. Harleen features the sexiest Joker you're ever likely to see. Harleen quickly loses her state of neutrality herself, falling right into the Joker’s hand.ĭespite his failure as a writer to make the Joker interesting, Šejić does a great job as an artist of showing why Harley is attracted to him. The two viewpoints, Joker and Batman’s, sit opposite of hers, almost symbolizing the extremism within Gotham and foreshadowing the invisibility that no one can stay neutral in a city constantly at war. When Harleen returns to Joker, wanting to know more about his thoughts on the monsters he believes inhabits Gotham, she sees it all through a new lens after having heard Batman’s thoughts. Traditionally, Batman is compared with Joker, so seeing Harleen attempt to find meaning in Batman’s morality, specifically the reason he doesn’t kill, makes for an interesting conversation and deep dive into her character.
The latter half of the book compares Harleen’s complicated morality to Batman’s and in doing so creates an interesting dichotomy I haven’t seen in a Batman-related story. This is partly because Harleen’s conversation with the Joker ends up being anti-climatic, which, considering Harleen herself frames it as one of the most important conversations of her life, is disappointing. The pacing in Harleen #2 suffers at the beginning. It's also one of the reasons Harleen works as a comic, despite the oversaturation of Joker content at the moment-because it depicts Harleen Quinzel as a fundamentally decent person going down a dark path, one the audience knows the end of but Harleen herself doesn't. It's one of the reasons why Breaking Bad is such a popular show, six years after its finale. It can be both painful and thrilling to watch a good person do bad things.
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