Harley Quinn #11 - DC Comics

HARLEY QUINN No. 11, March 2022

Largely focusing upon this ongoing series’ titular character, Stephanie Phillips’ narrative for Issue Ten of “Harley Quinn” surely must have entertained the vast majority of its audience with its well-penned combination of action, adventure and desperate decision-making. Indeed, “Bad Math” goes to great lengths so as to show just how far the colourfully-costumed anti-heroine has come in helping the mentally anguished former-pawns of her mass- murdering "Puddin" get over their psychological trauma, and how highly she now places the wellbeing of Gotham City’s innocent inhabitants; “How long will it take… to crawl along the underside of the train and defuse the bomb before it reaches the station, killing hundreds..?”

Furthermore, the twenty-two page periodical’s plot also contains some scintillatingly tense set-pieces, due to the “very dramatic villain named Keepsake” attacking Harleen Quinzel with a formidably-sized army of gun-toting robo-cops. These pumpkin-headed automatons provide the “expert gymnast” with the perfect opportunity to demonstrate her considerable acrobatic skills, as well as show just how devastating the Gotham City Siren can be with both her infamous baseball bat and Arnold Schwarzenegger action movie quotes.

Perhaps however, this comic’s most impressive moment comes when Quinn is forced to finally decide between saving her “best friend, and sidekick, Kevin” or the hapless travellers frequenting Gotham Central Station some 250 miles away. The Joker’s former girlfriend barely hesitates in potentially dooming her rotund pal to a grisly death, but the raw emotion in her voice as she says “I’m so sorry, Kevin…” literally leaps off the page, and signifies that she will be doing her level base to stop the rampaging steam locomotive she’s been handcuffed to before its slices her chubby chum to pieces beneath its wheels.

Adding plenty of dynamically-drawn panels to this tale is Riley Rossmo, whose ability to pencil Harley leaping from one assailant to another with all the grace of a flying trapeze artist is breath-taking. In addition, the Canadian artist’s marvellous design of Keepsake’s giant robot trooper is very well visualised, and helps provide some believability to the notion of just how this book’s central protagonist is captured by the heavily-armed machine, when a plethora of its smaller robotic brethren failed in their mission to do so.

Writer: Stephanie Phillips, Artist: Riley Rossmo, and Colors: Ivan Plascencia