First created as a sidekick for The Joker in Batman: The Animated Series, the character
of Harley Quinn has always been a little warped.
But in the decades since her introduction, she's gone from being a weird slapstick punching
bag for her clown boyfriend to having a huge following and having a lot of character agency.
Giving Harley more to do has been really cool for the character, but naturally, this is
meant drastic ramifications for all the characters surrounding her.
So here are the five darkest Harley Quinn moments.
NUMBER FIVE
One of the great joys in life to watch an anti-hero tear down villains that are worse
than they are.
It's like watching crime eat itself, it's sort of a cannibalism if you will.
So it's only appropriate that Harley Quinn wants to con a gang of, well you know, cannibals.
In the story Red Meat, Harley sets aside her giant mallet to go toe-to-toe with her natural
enemy...
The Mayor of New York City?
That's right, she leaves behind the high rises of Gotham for the... high rises of real-life
Gotham, New York for some reason to take on a fictionalized Bill DeBlasio stand-in who
has only one policy platform worse than running the MTA into the ground...
This guy's all about combatting the city's epidemic of homelessness by literally eating
the homeless.
Harley plays helpless to bait the would-be kidnappers only to, you know, actually be
kidnapped by them?
So I guess that plan kind of worked!
Anyhow, her Hungry Hungry Hannibals throw her into a room full of skeletons... which
is like, totally old hat to her at this point.
We'll get more on why "imprisoned in a corpse-filled room" means nothing to her soon.
But she manages to find some sharp chompers on a skull of the former food and gives her
the opportunity to chomp back at her restraints.
Brought directly into the den of the flesh-hungry rich, the only thing left is for her to let
them feast on a schmorgazborg of violence, including taking the top of a toilet water
tank to the soft little skull of the big bad.
Gratifying as it is to see Harley Quinn smash the one percent to pieces as retribution for
literally and figuratively eating the poor, we do have to recall that she's not always
doing the little guy favors.
Sometimes she's blowing up the little guy, and the littler the better.
Which brings us to:
NUMBER FOUR
We've seen a few amendments to Harley's origins over the years, but it pretty much always
comes back to her doing whatever she can to get the attention of her green haired puddin'
pop.
But few cards are as wild as The Joker, and it takes some real stretching to get him to
turn his head.
Enter Detective Comics #23.2 where the only thing more upsetting than the numbering conventions
is what Harley Quinn does to this slew of children during Christmas.
In the pre-Switch era, the DS reigned supreme and every kid wanted-- what?
Oh.
I'm sorry.
I guess they mean the AceBoy reigned supreme.
I guess I'm still thrown by that New York instead of Gotham thing from the last entry.
Okay, I guess we're doing fake names now.
In any case, these kids are excited to play whatever Portuguese knock-off of Pokemon that
the AceBoy ships with, but the systems have to do a little update first... an update that
looks suspiciously like a timer.
Especially when you dramatically cut across a ton of panels of it.
Look, if you lived in a world of crocodile men and giant nursery rhyme corpses and you
know regular gassings...
You'd be right to be suspicious of free high priced electronics, but a deal is still a
deal, folks.
And sometimes the price of that deal is, you know, like a... a lot of kids getting blown
up.
But lucky for Harley, she has a fantastic ability to completely disassociated from reality
and doesn't realize what she's doing is wrong at all.
Lucky, that's where we come in.
To feel the guilt for her.
Lucky us.
Oh boy.
NUMBER THREE
Yeah, so, lucky us.
The only people who get to experience th reality of Harley Quinn's violent tendencies.
Both The Joker and Harley have a longstanding fascination with Warner Brothers/Looney Tunes
style silly violence, guns with bang flags, dynamite, and that time they made Batman run
into that tunnel painted on the side of a mountain...
That one's made up, but you could see it happening.
I could see it happening.
A lot of this may have something to do with Harley's origin being in a kid's cartoon,
but things get strange and dark when this kiddie style violence is recontextualized
for adult audiences.
Enter this fight from Harley's first ongoing series.
After being betrayed by a crew member, we are treated to a zany slapstick Spy Versus
Spy or Daffy Duck style battle which culminates in this goofy dynamite double switcheroo.
We find out what happens when you mess with Harley - You get conked in your bonker and
you see stars and birdies!
That is, at least until you turn the page.
Then we see what really happened.
This lady isn't just conked out in a silly fashion, she's done the ultimate conk.
She's shuffled off this mortal conker.
She's dead, is what I'm trying to say.
But still, Harley insists that this corpse "stay and think" about what she's done as
if Harley's completely oblivious to blowing this lady away!
To her, it really just is a cartoon.
This breakdown of reality and perceived reality is cleverly delineated by two different art
styles.
Craig Risos's simple lines and exaggerated features suggesting a heightened cartoon reality,
and the crowded art of Terry Dodson casting the stark light of reality on the situation.
If you ever wanted to get in the headspace of real-life villains and understand how they
can interpret violence in a way that seems so carefree...
Well, it's probably not actually like this.
But, it is a very interesting interpretation.
NUMBER TWO
Speaking of interesting interpretations, The New 52 gave us one of the most interesting
interpretations of The Joker...
And by "interesting" I mean...
I didn't like it.
But it's notably weird and let's talk about it anyway.
The J-Man showed up late on the scene of this new comic's landscape, which gave Harley some
time to exist out on her own.
She even took this reboot as an opportunity to distance herself from her love/tormenter.
Unfortunately, The Joker didn't quite feel the same way.
Despite his constant displays of irritation at her affection, it seems that minute he
didn't have her enthralled with him he snapped.
So he did the natural thing and locked her up in a room full of skeletons.
Yes!
Now we have two entries involving two rooms full of rotting corpses just for the price
of one.
And I mean technically this video is free, so you're getting, well, QUITE the deal.
Quite the deal on horrible corpse room entries.
So what's Joker's endgame here?
Well, it's hard to say.
He outright claims that he's had multiple Harleys present in the room, as you can tell
from their costumes.
Maybe this is the same way there have been multiple Robins, or how they have been multiple
Jokers?
Who really knows.
The thing is, if it's true, it's clear he has a type.
Pig-tailed, and extremely expendable.
If not, then Joker is trying to pull the ultimate neg on Harley Quinn to get her to want to
impress him.
And that is some truly repulsive next level pick-up artist shit.
You see that Joker costume?
He's totally peacocking, right?
Either way, it's clear he wants her to think that HE, a clown in a purple suit, is cool.
And through sheer force of will, she manages to destroy her wrists and escape these shackles
and wind up back in the arms of her dumb boyfriend.
Real good.
Real good, Harley.
And NUMBER ONE
To borrow a beloved word from a most beloved version of The Joker, the relationship between
Harley and the J-Man can only be described as "Damaged."
Yes, it's exaggerated beyond all reason, and through the ways they express themselves are
occasionally uncomfortably real depictions of physical and emotional abuse, they're frequently
just so bonkers that you have to step back and say: Woah comics.
Why are you...
Why are you?
That's just the full sentence.
Remember when Edgelord Joker infamously cut off his face for a while?
Well, there was a moment there where that limp sack of flesh was in the hands of none
other than Harley Quinn.
And without her puddin' around, or all of him at least, she took the piece of him that
she did have as some kind of creepy therapy doll.
While it would be bad enough for her to go ape on this mask solo, she took things further
by enlisting the help of an unwitting Deadshot to sit in as Joker.
Harley has a lot of feelings to work though, angry ones, horny ones, it's a grotesque cavalcade
of therapeutic moments offering Harley an unexpected outlet that she's never really
had the opportunity to explore.
It's dark, it's gritty, it's unsettling, it's gross...
But most of all, it's extremely unsanitary.
I mean... put that on ice at least.
You know?
Formaldehyde or something.
Disinfect it.
It's just skin.