Harley Quinn #4 - DC Comics

HARLEY QUINN No. 4, August 2021

For those amongst this comic’s 47,000 readers who were anticipating some sort of team-up or dust-off between its titular character and the formidably-sized Solomon Grundy, Stephanie Phillips’ script for Issue Four of “Harley Quinn” was probably something of a major disappointment. Indeed, considering this book’s pre-publication publicity by “DC Comics”, complete with a massively foreboding cover illustration of the zombie super-villain menacing Quinzel down inside a dank sewer, the fact that the pair of colourful criminals only engage in a short-lived game of chess with one another is probably the last thing anyone was actually expecting.

Sadly however, so brief an appearance by the giant revenant is arguably just one of this particular twenty-two page periodical’s problems, with the American author seemingly struggling with the book’s pacing and relying upon Riley Rossmo to significantly pad out the publication with his prodigious pencilling. The aforementioned boardgame between the Gotham City Siren and Alfred Bester’s co-creation is an example of this, although perhaps a much more noticeable one involves a continuous thirty-eight panel sequence of Kevin simply being injected with a hallucinogenic drug by Hugo Strange.

Fortunately, Phillips’ narrative does debatably pick up once Harleen finally decides to rescue her sidekick, and momentarily adopts the tactics of the Dark Knight himself so as to infiltrate the S.A.F.E. Headquarters with the minimum of fuss. This rather tongue-in-cheek scene is very well penned, and contains all the laugh-out-loud humour a bibliophile might expect from a set-piece involving the trained psychiatrist turned costumed vigilante: “I’m not sure if that makes Batman the naked lady or the ass in this particular scenario… maybe both?”

Likewise, the writing also appears much stronger just as soon as Harley’s infamous bad luck strikes her stealthy rescue attempt, and she once again resorts to simply battering her numerous foes black and blue with a baseball bat. Dynamically drawn by this comic’s regular Canadian artist, Quinn’s battle inside the confined space of a lift with three of Strange’s sadistic orderlies is probably this book’s highlight, and sets the storyline up for a cracking cliff-hanger when the anti-hero reaches the blacked out tenth floor…

Written by: Stephanie Phillips, Art & Cover by: Riley Rossmo, and Colored by: Ivan Plascencia