I re-read Tini Howard’s Harley Quinn Vol. 1: Girl in Crisis in preparation for reading the second volume, and I liked it more than I did before; that was my experience with the first volume of Howard’s Catwoman, too. There’s aspects of Howard’s work that still don’t sit right with me — leaps of logic, characters knowing things that story-wise they ought not know — but Girl in Crisis was better than I recalled, particularly Howard’s masterful integration of the Knight Terrors: Harley Quinn two-parter into her own story, something I don’t think any other DC Universe writer did.

So I was optimistic going into Howard and Sweeney Boo’s Harley Quinn Vol. 2: Eye Don’t Like Me, which kicks off with some promising multiversal shenanigans — something is killing the Harleys, to borrow a phrase, and our Harley has to figure out who. But six issues ends up feeling interminable, full of repetition and non sequiturs. Howard’s “what’s the point of Harley Quinn” ending might have been necessary once upon a time, but by now Harley is so well established, her agency already litigated and relitigated, that Howard’s conclusion is also repetitive, a story suited for much earlier than Harley’s sixth or seventh creative team in mainstream comics alone.