Tini Howard’s Harley Quinn Vol. 3: Clown About Town, like the volumes before it, is still overwritten and often clumsy when it comes to the little details of putting together a comic. At the same time, there’s a conversation here that, for DC, maybe could only be found in a Harley Quinn comic, or at least that Howard’s the only writer who’s been willing to have it.

I know by now my tastes and Howard’s don’t align and that I’m going to have trouble when I follow the DC Universe into one of her books, but I wholly respect the content here that no one else has produced.

[Review contains spoilers]

Howard leaves behind the multiversal shenanigans of the last two volumes, for better or worse; between Harley Quinn Vol. 1: Girl in a Crisis and Harley Quinn Vol. 2: Eye Don’t Like Me, there’s been a lot of build up about Harley and the DC Multiverse that just gets left behind here (we never saw poor Lux Kirby again). The trade-off is a book that’ll probably seem more familiar to Harley Quinn television show fans — Harley, in Gotham, hobnobbing with other Gotham rogues — if not necessarily wrapping up Howard’s makeshift trilogy satisfactorily.

Among the great struggle to give Harley something to do, and having left behind landlord and Bat-vigilante and multiversal explorer, Howard settles on Harley as a villains' psychologist, seeking to help Gotham’s baddies come to terms with their issues. That’s viable — I think most good portrayals of Harley have remembered she’s scattered but far from stupid — as is her job since the beginning of Howard’s run as a community college professor. At the same time I’m not sure to what extent all of that manifests in this book and series; a lot of Harley’s efforts as psychologist are twisted by Mr. Freeze to his own ends, and students like Summer Sheridan are all but absent in the end, same as the multiversal figures. I’ll be curious if any of this is preserved by the book’s next team. (Narrator: It was not.)

Harley’s also back in her old costume in this volume, or at least the closest thing since the end of the early 2000s Harley series. It’s significant, in that Howard and artist Sweeney Boo seem to have figured out how to blend old and new in such a way that this is still the modern Margot Robbie Harley — blue and pink pigtails that Boo has increasingly drawn like rabbit ears — but who also doesn’t look old-fashioned on the page in the Batman: The Animated Series harlequin suit. It speaks visually to Howard’s recasting Harley as more villain-focused in this run, a split from Stephanie Phillips' Bat-family Harley (as tying in to James Tynion’s Batman run); again, it’ll be interesting to see what direction the next Harley team takes her in. (Narrator: It would be a different one.)

There are growing pains in Harley seemingly exiting the Bat-family, evident in her more-cantankerous-than-normal interactions with Robin Tim Drake here. But Howard takes the opportunity (or sets up the opportunity) of Harley teamed with Tim to address what they recently have in common — Howard’s best joke of the book is when Tim contemplates which approach he and Harley will take to infiltrate Freeze’s “Icescraper” and Harley replies, “Ain’t it obvious, with you an' me? We go both ways.”

Tim is reluctant to talk, perhaps believably because he’s not in the habit of discussing his personal life with former supervillains. But Howard’s Harley interprets it another way; “I get it,” she says. “It’s like people’re allergic to the word bisexual. Like we ain’t finished loadin' or something, and it’s still all up in the air.”

I can’t say if Howard meant this universally or as something more meta, but indeed we can see it in the Tim character’s own experience, and Superman Jon Kent, too. Both of these characters' in-book coming out stories have largely been coded as gay, with bisexuality having only been declared by DC press release, due perhaps to an outsized concern over codifying their previous straight relationships. I’m relatively certain that despite the good work DC has done in the past few years to raise awareness of their queer characters, this is the first time the word “bisexual” has seen print around these characters in a mainstream DC book — as Howard’s Harley says, “like people’re allergic.”

There’s difficulty here on both sides — that Tim and Jon really seem to be coming out as gay but that DC feels a certain pressure to call them bisexual, and that DC should announce them as bisexual but that their stories don’t reflect the unique nuances of that identity. Which is to say, even if Howard’s Clown About Town is scattershot — see when Harley takes a valuable crystal from Tim to use against Freeze, but is then immediately trying to give it back to Tim to keep it from Freeze — at least Howard manufactures an opportunity to reduce the cognitive dissonance; Tim is bisexual and talks about being bisexual here (or, at least, listens when Harley talks about it).

That’s a good thing in an unlikely place. Also Howard uses Maxie Zeus, one of my favorite under-appreciated Batman rogues; there’s also an unexpected appearance by Vandal Savage, nodding to events in Chip Zdarsky’s Batman. In a couple places, too, Howard has artist Natacha Bustos drawing villain profiles with limited colors by Nick Filardi, and I thought these were very affecting. All of that helps boost a book that’s otherwise rather slow and, again, clumsy. At one point bullets literally bounce off Harley, something that … shouldn’t happen? Another time Harley is talking while she’s also drinking something, what seems a comics 101 no-no, in the same panel that’s she’s also holding up a sign that repeats the same dialogue she’s speaking. In the final courtroom scene, it’s exceptionally difficult to tell who’s talking and who’s lecturing whom.

I’m not sorry to see this run ending; I don’t imagine that’s a surprise. Harley Quinn books have this problem, even at the beginning of the famed Amanda Conner/Jimmy Palmiotti run — sometimes trying to be funny and filling up 22 pages combine to something that feels like a slog to get through. Despite some bright, even groundbreaking parts, Harley Quinn Vol. 3: Clown About Town is that way, too. I’m not at all familiar with the next creative team, but I hope that portends a pleasant surprise. (Narrator: You know.)

[Includes original and variant covers]