Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *
Vengeance is a dish best served slightly less chilled than its more unnerving half sibling Revenge, for vengeance reeks of slaughter on a bigger scale, it doesn’t just require the two spades that revenge insists be carried, it asks for a dumper truck, a blind eye and a concrete mixer big enough to fill in a new section of motorway. For vengeance takes down all who get in the way and for Harley Quinn, getting in the way is a hobby that crosses boundaries between the good, the bad and the psychiatrist chair are all too strewn with Vengeance Unlimited.
Vengeance Unlimited changes tack slightly from the other graphic novels bearing the mistress of mayhem as the antihero that have come into being since her conception in the animated Batman series. It regales in the delight of being rougher round the edges, the artwork going between the startling to the enjoyable via the desperately beautiful and at each turn of the page of A. Lieberman’s, Mike Huddleston’s and Troy Nixey’s work. The feeling of righteous mayhem that defines Harley Quinn is enough to give the reader an urge to delve further into the world of the messed up in the head, cunning and times admirable psychotic criminal.
The two stories that make up Vengeance Unlimited, the eponymous story and the unyielding frankness of Behind Blue Eyes both capture the mind of Harley Quinn/Harleen Quinzel in a way that doesn’t come through in some of the other publications. This is a woman to whom mothers warn their sons or even daughters, not to go near, to leave well alone because of the unbalanced crazy that resides in the red and blue suit. Yet the personality of such a being not only captivates, but draws in the inexperienced and the less than world wise into a web of the disturbed craving of submission in the face of dominance.
The mental state of many of the villains that ply their trade in the world of the graphic novel is never up for debate, neither to be fair is some of the heroes that are driven to stop them, but if the dual personality that sits under the surface of Harley Quinn’s Joker induced make up can be akin to anybody, it is to Batman that the reader must look.
The yin and the yang, the double sided coin that lands on its edge every time it is flipped lives both in D.C.’s finest ever creation and the villain that came from out of nowhere to fulfil a story line. “For vengeance shall be mine says the Lord”; what any deity would quiver with anticipation to have Harley Quinn on its side.
A very interesting read, in many ways close to what was first envisaged when the creative desire overtook the need for a one off character. Vengeance Unlimited is something to behold.
Harley Quinn: Vengeance Unlimited is available to purchase from Worlds Apart on Lime Street, Liverpool.
Ian D. Hall