Future State: Harley Quinn #2 - DC Comics

FUTURE STATE: HARLEY QUINN No. 2, April 2021

Fascinatingly focusing far more upon the titular character’s ability to outthink her opponents, rather than simply batter her way out of a problem with her infamous baseball bat, Stephanie Phillips’ plot for this particular twenty-two page periodical probably pleased the majority of its audience when it initially hit the spinner-racks in February 2021, and arguably deserved its spot as the month’s thirty-eighth best-selling comic. In fact, the American author presents such an intriguingly different insight into just how this 'psychiatrist from the Multiverse' operates that it comes as no surprise “DC Comics” consequently gave her the reins of “the ongoing Harley Quinn series” a short time later.

For starters, the anti-hero manages to play a masterful game of wits with the Scarecrow and Roman Sionis. Both of these terrifying criminal masterminds are absolutely nobody’s fool, yet Harleen Quinzel appears able to quite beautifully play them off against one another so as to ensure that the Black Mask’s murderous machinations throughout Gotham City are brought to a swift end. Moreover, the Cupid of Crime also enacts a little revenge of her own upon Jonathan Crane by persuading the supposedly reformed government official to once again don his fearful mask, and then subsequently steal the phobia-inducing device to ensure her escape from the Professor’s custody; “Harley… Did she? She… She did this… All of this… Harley Quinn has ruined me.”

Of course, that isn’t to say that Phillips’ incarnation of the Joker’s former-squeeze simply relies upon psychological one-upmanship to get her way, as agreeably Issue Two of “Future State: Harley Quinn” still contains plenty of brutal head-bashing and smart-mouthed action once the chemically-coloured woman finally decides to get physical with her wooden bat. In addition, this publication’s macabre death of Senator Hanssen in a lavish, skyline restaurant will probably give anyone slightly squeamish nightmares for at least a fortnight.

Helping push this comic’s creativity up an extra notch or two, is undoubtedly the almost animation-like art-style of its illustrations by Simone Di Meo and Toni Infante, which definitely imbues some of Quinn’s most earnest blows with some additional bone-crunching heaviness. However, occasionally this pencilling panache debatably gets in the way of the actual storytelling, and can cause moments of confusion, such as when Sionis is suddenly shown in a couple of panels as a blonde-haired man in dark clothing during the Scarecrow’s initial assault upon the sadistic super-villain’s senses.

The regular cover art of "FUTURE STATE: HARLEY QUINN #2 by Derrick Chew