Harley Quinn's popularity is a fairly recent phenomenon, so you might not remember the
finer details of her backstory.
But with Birds of Prey hitting cinemas and a new Suicide Squad on the horizon, now is
as good a time as any to bone up on Harley's dark and checkered past.
Harley Quinn is a member of a short list of comic book characters who weren't adapted
from page to screen, but actually went about it the other way around.
The character first appeared in "Joker's Favor," a 1992 episode of Batman: The Animated Series.
Throughout the show, she made regular appearances as a henchwoman obsessed with the Joker, and
the Clown Prince of Crime clearly doesn't reciprocate her feelings.
"The babies!
We can’t leave the babies!
“I’ll buy you a goldfish let's go!"
Animated Series writer Paul Dini conceived of Harley Quinn while watching his old college
friend Arleen Sorkin on Days of Our Lives.
Sorkin dressed as a joker in a dream sequence for the soap, and the scene inspired Dini
to not only create Joker's twisted girlfriend but to hire Sorkin to voice her.
Sorkin went on to play Quinn on numerous projects over the following decades, most recently
for the online roleplaying game DC Universe Online.
Speaking about her character to Starlog Magazine, Sorkin said:
"She wants to be a good girl, but it's so much more her to be a bad one."
It would take seven years from her TV debut for Harley Quinn to officially become part
of the DC Comics Universe.
Quinn had previously appeared in comics, most memorably in the 1994 64-page special The
Batman Adventures: Mad Love, which established her origin as Joker's former doctor at Arkham
Asylum.
But those comics were connected to the world of the animated series, and they weren't part
of the larger DC Comics narrative.
Harley's first canonical appearance in DC comics came in 1999's Batman: Harley Quinn
#1, which made up part of the No Man's Land event in which Gotham City is abandoned by
the US government after being nearly destroyed by a massive earthquake.
Like her counterpart in Mad Love, this Harley was also Joker's doctor, and again she fell
for him in a big way.
Harley helps Joker escape Arkham Asylum, gets caught, and is immediately committed herself.
When the events of No Man's Land enable all the asylum's inmates to escape, Quinn finds
her jester get-up in an abandoned costume store, and seeks out her lost love.
Of course, Harley is as loyal as always, taking on Penguin and his goons for Joker and later
going one-on-one with Batman so Joker can make his escape.
Obviously, Joker's reward is to trick her into going inside a rocket which he then crashes
remotely.
Harley survives, and it's Poison Ivy who finds her and nurses her back to health, kicking
off a storied relationship for the comics version of Harley.
The first ongoing Harley Quinn comic premiered in late 2000.
In the first issue, Harley is still under Joker's spell in spite of the abuse she's
endured by his hand.
But eventually, with the help of Poison Ivy, Harley manages to see enough of the real Joker
to rebel against him and his henchmen.
Their renewed relationship ends with Harley hurling the Clown Prince of Crime into a neon
sign.
The series ended with 2004's Harley Quinn #38, a story that left its hero with a bleak,
yet predictable, fate.
The final issue ends with Harley deciding she belongs back home and the penultimate
page shows Harley, in the pouring rain, pounding on the doors of Arkham Asylum.
In the last page's final panel, as Quinn is led to her cell, her face breaks into a smile.
In 2009, Harley Quinn made some friends.
That year saw the debut of Gotham City Sirens #1, in which Harley joins forces with fellow
female anti-heroes Catwoman and Poison Ivy.
It all starts after Ivy saves Catwoman from a supervillain wanna-be named Bonebreaker,
after which she invites Selina Kyle to her new home the apartment of the Riddler, who
Ivy has rendered catatonic with her mind control powers.
And then Harley shows up shortly afterward, announcing she's moving in.
It's clear that, even after years of abuse and multiple attempts to kill each other,
Harley is still obsessed with the Joker.
Shortly after arriving at Ivy's new pad, Harley insists she's over "Mr. J," then seconds later,
excitedly asks if he's called.
By the end of the issue, the three women have agreed to join forces, and leave Riddler's
apartment for an abandoned animal shelter.
Gotham City Sirens would only last 26 issues but if nothing else, it marked an important
step in the evolution of Harley Quinn.
After all, this series saw Harley's first comics team-up with other women in lead roles,
a pattern that would be repeated throughout the character's history.
In August 2009, both DC fans and gamers alike were treated to one of the franchise's best
ever video games Batman: Arkham Asylum.
In this hit game, the player takes on the role of Batman who, after delivering Joker
to the titular asylum, is forced to stop a breakout conceived by the Clown Prince of
Crime himself.
Naturally, Harley is all too happy to get involved.
"Bye bye for now!"
Harley appears a fair bit throughout the game, though she's one of the only Bat-villains
that the player never confronts physically.
After sending squads of thugs after the hero, Harley is easily overpowered by Batman in
a cutscene.
What's perhaps most significant about Harley's spot in the game, however, is that it's her
first major appearance in media without her classic jester suit.
Instead, she wears a nurse outfit, sporting the twin ponytails that would later become
a Harley Quinn staple.
Believe it or not, Harley Quinn didn't appear at all in the first three volumes of Suicide
Squad.
But in the years since, she's since become such an inseparable part of Task Force X that
it's difficult to imagine there was a time when the team of villains could function without
her.
Harley's 2011 debut in Suicide Squad came as part of DC's line-wide reboot, The New
52, during which Harley's jester look was abandoned for colorful ponytails and a much
skimpier outfit.
Adam Glass wrote most of the first 19 issues of the new volume, teaming Harley up with
Task Force X mainstays like Deadshot and Captain Boomerang, as well as newer additions like
King Shark and Diablo.
There have been two subsequent volumes of Suicide Squad since the New 52 series ended
with its 30th issue, as well as the short-lived New Suicide Squad, with Harley center-stage
at every turn.
Girl loves the spotlight.
Three years after the debut of the New 52, Harley once again starred in her own solo
series.
This time, Harley's story was co-written by a team that has since become a fan-favorite:
Amanda Conner and Jimmy Palmiotti.
These two writers arguably became so popular because they knew just why people love Harley:
because she's fun.
The series opens with Harley being willed an entire apartment building on Coney Island
from an old patient.
There she's joined by hilarious supporting characters such as the ex-spy, Sy Borgman,
and the dead beaver Bernie who is in constant contact with Harley despite, you know, being
dead.
For a long time, there was rampant speculation that Harley Quinn and fellow Gotham City anti-hero
Poison Ivy were more than just friends.
They'd been trading innuendo and hints in comics, cartoons, and even video games for
years, but it was a long time before there was any kind of official word on the matter.
However, writers Jimmy Palmiotti and Amanda Conner confirmed Harley and Ivy's relationship
status in 2015.
And in 2017's Harley Quinn #25, fans finally got to see these two characters share a kiss.
Sadly, Ivy's unexpected death in the 2018 mini-series Heroes in Crisis is part of what
drives Harley over the edge and again puts her on a collision course with a group of
heroes including Batman and Booster Gold.
Thankfully, this isn't the end of Ivy.
By the end of the series, it's discovered that Ivy prepared for her death by creating
a plant-based clone of herself.
Since then, Harley and the new Ivy have teamed up for the 2019 Harley Quinn and Poison Ivy
miniseries.
In 2016, Harley Quinn finally made her way to the big screen sporting a baseball bat
and short shorts combo in David Ayer's Suicide Squad.
Rising star Margot Robbie was cast in the role of the mentally unhinged Quinn, after
impressing critics and audiences with her performance in Martin Scorsese's The Wolf
of Wall Street.
Amidst an ensemble cast, including superstar Will Smith, Viola Davis and Jared Leto, Robbie's
version of Harley was a genuine standout.
"I'm known to be vexing I’m just warning you.”
“Lady shut up!"
Of course, it's no secret that Suicide Squad wasn't exactly a favorite of the critics.
But even the critics who couldn't stand the movie as a whole pointed to Robbie's performance
as a merciful exception.
The Chicago Tribune's Michael Phillips, for example, wrote:
"Robbie is radioactively watchable, swinging her baseball bat this way and that, selling
this skeezy male-fantasy nutjob with wide-eyed enthusiasm."
In early 2018, DC Comics announced the launch of its Black Label imprint.
DC Black Label promised to give premiere talent the opportunity to tell standalone, mature-readers
stories outside of the current DC Universe continuity.
This freedom allows creators to tell exactly the stories they want to tell without worrying
about impacting the broader DC Comics Universe.
And as you might've guessed, Harley Quinn has already proven to be the star of two of
the imprint's miniseries: Harleen and Joker/Harley: Criminal Sanity.
Joker/Harley: Criminal Sanity, by writer Kami Garcia, reframes Harley's origin completely.
Instead of beginning her comic book life as Joker's doctor in Arkham Asylum, the Harley
of Criminal Sanity is a criminal profiler assisting the Gotham Police Department in
tracking down a killer.
Meanwhile, Stjepan Šejić's Harleen offers the more familiar Dr. Harleen Quinzel of Arkham
Asylum but refuses to take her relationship with the Joker for granted.
Instead, Šejić takes readers on a slow-burn, intriguing trip, in order to show exactly
how the flawed Dr. Quinzel could become so tragically obsessed with the Joker.
In February 2020, fans will finally get the chance to see Margot Robbie reprise the role
of Harley in Birds of Prey (and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn).
The film takes place after a bad break up between Harley and the Joker, and like the
DC Universe animated series Harley Quinn, the anti-heroine is now on a quest to make
her own way in the world.
Along the way, she's joined by a number of mainstays from DC's mythos— such as Jurnee
Smollett-Bell's Black Canary, Mary Elizabeth Winstead's Huntress, Rosie Perez's former
Gotham cop Renee Montoya, and Ella Jay Basco's Cassandra Cain.
Joker doesn't appear in the film in person, though.
Instead, Harley and her new allies face Ewan McGregor's maniacal crime lord Black Mask.
The Birds of Prey have had a number of series over the years, and they even had their own
short-lived television series in the early aughts.
But Harley's addition to the movie team and her prominence in the line-up is one of the
biggest departures from the Birds of Prey comics.
On the page, she really has nothing to do with the crew at all.
Now though, just like with Suicide Squad, her name is pretty much inseparable from the
brand.
Harley Quinn is taking over the world.
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