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.

And while Howard’s series as a whole does present a promising evolution for Harley’s presence in the DCU, I do worry that in some respects we’ve traded one regressive idea of Harley Quinn for another.

[Review contains spoilers]

Harley is helped in hunting the multiversal killer by Lux Kirby, a clock-headed detective who shows up both to present the mystery to Harley and to guide her through it — Howard’s vehicle to deliver quite a bit of exposition.¹ There’s a history of sidekicks among the Harley series — Sy Borgman, the Gang of Harleys, Red Tool, Petite Tina, Kevin — of which Lux could be another, but we learn painfully little about them. Harley tries to learn Lux’s backstory in an extended scene where they tromp around a mini-mart, but Lux is noncommittal. It’s a frustrating scene demonstrative of a lot of the book, in that things are happening (Harley shops and eats) and people are talking (Harley and Lux), but at the end one doesn’t feel the story’s been advanced more than just that five pages have been used.

As an another example, the third chapter sees Lady Quark introduce a Harley AI to try to replicate the real Harley’s nascent multiversal powers. The digital Harley inexplicably disappears, and though it’s been tasked with studying the real Harley, it shows up and attacks her for reasons never quite explained (alongside a rather boilerplate tech store parody).

There’s a page of Harley escaping, two pages of her talking with Lux, then three pages of Harley and Lux questioning an alt-universe Poison Ivy about her Harley’s murder. All that comes out of that is to suggest the digital Harley as the murderer, something that time-wise doesn’t make sense and that doesn’t quite square with a group of Brothers Eye² as the actual murderers. (Why, even, the Brothers Eye needed to murder a couple Harleys in order to take our Harley as their prisoner, I couldn’t pin down nor could I find it flipping back through.) There’s an astounding amount of content in those 22 pages — Howard and Boo don’t skimp on dialogue nor panels — but little of it is actually important, such that it continually feels like the book is just jogging in place.

In the end, it seems the Brothers Eye want to learn to about “personhood” from Harley, someone “who was never meant to be much at all … but suffered enough abuse to become something great.” Howard has Harley push back, of course, that her greatness is not in the abuse she suffered but in her ability to overcome it. Either way, Howard’s still, still, got us in the Joker of it all; the effects of trauma may recur throughout a real person’s life, but for the fictional Harley Quinn, it seems Howard’s just hitting the most prevalent beats that others have done before. Ultimately Harley teaches the Brothers Eye that her secret to self-efficacy was that she “slowed down, worked hard, and was kind to myself,” which indeed we don’t even see in the book so much as Howard is building off the general Harley zeitgeist established by others.

I thought Howard did well early in the book when Harley’s afraid of endangering Ivy and so distances herself in their relationship; Howard, Boo, and letterer Steve Wands have a panel where Harley and Ivy are patently not speaking, but the background is filled with all the words they’re not saying to one another. In a few places Howard depicts the realities of being in a relationship with someone or as someone with mental illness, and I thought these came off effectively. And Eye, like Girl in Crisis before it, does dovetail with G. Willow Wilson’s Poison Ivy, perhaps the first time that Harley and Ivy’s ongoing relationship has been presented in real-ish time across their separate adventures. You love to see it.

But between the main story, Harley’s multiversal travels, and a bunch of the “dream sequence” backup stories, there’s a lot of worrying Harley does about Ivy here — does she love me, am I hurting her, is she angry, so on and so forth. Even as the continuity is great — Harley and Ivy are really in a relationship, and you can see it in the day-to-day of the DCU — I’m concerned we’ve traded one codependent identity for Harley for another. Used to be Harley was the Joker’s moll, and indeed we’re still talking about what that did to her; now Harley’s dating Ivy, and concern for Ivy occupies a lot of air in the book. I enjoy their relationship and the attention the creative teams give to it, but there was a time too when Harley had other concerns.

Tini Howard’s Harley Quinn Vol. 2: Eye Don’t Like Me follows just a few books after Stephanie Phillips' Harley Quinn Vol. 5: Who Killed Harley Quinn?), another volume about murder and the multiverse. Going into the first of Howard’s Harley books, the presence of both Captain Carrot and Lady Quark seemed to build on Phillips' work — not just multiversal Harleys now, but the Multiverse — but by the end of Eye, it’s clear this book could have reached much the same conclusion without involving the Multiverse at all. Not sure where Howard’s taking Harley in her final volume, but I’m satisfied to be seeing what a different creative team will do in the near future.

[Includes original and variant covers]