Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10
Re-invention is at times good for the soul, for D.C. Comics’ Harley Quinn it’s a positive boon.
The arguments of the New 52 series is one that might last until graphic novels sail long into the collective memory of all who have had the fortune to be taken on many a voyage of discovery with the utopian marriage of an excellent scripted story and the artwork that would adorn many a wall. It revived and refreshed what had become a standing joke amongst fans of the superhero genre in Aqua Man, it gave new context to titles such as The Justice League and perhaps greatest of all, took the most insane but beautifully crafted of modern inceptions of the D.C. world, Harley Quinn, and made her a true star in her own dramatic right.
What was perhaps initially a token gesture of gratitude to a character that had proved a big hit on the animated television series of Batman, the wonderful introduction of Harley Quinn in graphic novels such as Mad Love and Other Stories is taken up several notches by Amanda Connor and Jimmy Palmiotti and their creative team as Hot In The City shoves the true joker in the pack down the throats of the collected readership to the point of manic brilliance.
Hot In The City sees Ms. Quinn truly come into her irreverent own, panache, whimsical, brutal and thrilling, this is the anti-heroine that can sit beside Cat-Woman and tickle her stomach till she purrs. At the same time, she take apart almost every notion that come with the flaccid side of feminism in art, the weaker arguments of a noble cause and turns them on their head to show that even in the dark side of the graphic novel world, a woman can truly come out on top.
The several story lines that make up Hot In The City are bound together by Amanda Connor and Jimmy Palmiotti’s irresistible dynamic and the swathe of emotion that cuts through each panel. It is not necessarily a pure emotion, but like Frank Miller’s Sin City titles, it is an emotion that leads you willingly down a dark road, a road with no street lights, no map but only the power of being drawn into something so hauntingly dark and beautiful that it gives the reader goose bumps to savour.
It is the cheering of the anti-hero, the psychotic and the desperately unashamed that draws a reader. Like the 19th Century novel reader was turned on to the exploits of the highwayman Gothic romance to be found in Rookwood by William Harrison Ainsworth, so the 21st Century finds solace in the dark by following the exotic darkness that abounds in Harley Quinn. A woman who loves animals, who takes pity on the elderly and frail but who just happened to fall for the wrong man at the wrong time; a decision that has been at the centre of all her issues ever since!
In a world which at times turns it back on the light, Harley Quinn is the woman who can show the reader the way back to the light as the bad person who sometimes does good things, rather than the all consuming power of the man who does good but sometimes slips into the realm of night.
A graphic novel of consummate ease in which to dwell the twilight hours!
The New 52: Harley Quinn Volume 1: Hot in The City is available to purchase from Worlds Apart on Lime Street, Liverpool.
Ian D. Hall