The Long-Overdue Rise of Harley Quinn
This article contains light spoilers for Birds of Prey.
The character of Harley Quinn began as a running gag. Created in 1992 for Batman: The Animated Series, Harley served as a henchwoman with an unhealthy attachment to her boss, the Joker. The show wrung humor from her mostly one-sided obsession with the supervillain, but the relationship was toxic from the start: The Joker regularly chastised Harley, beat her, and even tried to kill her. Harley, a former psychiatrist seduced by the Joker’s psychopathy, became a character defined by her abuse—abuse usually played for laughs.
Over time, Harley shed that image, at least in print. The comic saw her rebel against the Joker; the 2009added her to a team of female villains; and the acclaimed run of her solo book, by the writers Amanda Conner and Jimmy Palmiotti, that began in 2013 updated her as an antiheroine who definitively cuts ties with the Joker and begins a life on her own. She constructs a lair on Coney Island, competes in roller derby, and enters into a same-sex romance with the villain Poison Ivy. Harley thus transformed into a character in her own right—less a hapless victim whose pain was used for Looney Tunesesque comic relief, and more a trauma survivor on a journey of self-discovery. Her development helped her become so popular that the DC Comics co-publisher Jim Lee , behind Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman.
