A Nice Harley Moment:: Her First Day in Arkham

[espanolbot]

From Paul Dini’s Detective Comics run, in which Harley is being taken back to Arkham after being broken out (against her will) by Scarface and Sugar to commit a robbery for them.

 

Bruce had denied her parole application earlier in the day, so he’s kind of confused that Harley took the first opportunity to immediately double cross Scarface, inform the cops what was going on, foil the robbery and willing come back to Arkham after the whole thing was over. Particularly since betraying a fellow member of the Gothamite Supervillain Club is kind of against her thing (she’s friends with most of them, see)…









And thus Harley was free, and remained so for some years until she went evil again at the end of Gotham Sirens or something.

Comments

[icon_uk]

That is a sweet moment.

Again, a little odd Batman seems a lot harder on Wesker than he would be when talking about Two-Face, when (and I find it odd that it never occurred to me before) that they are both cases of split personality with one criminal, one law abiding side, just that Wesker externalised his.

[espanolbot]

Arnold didn't display that he could be a good person as frequently as Harvey, that's the problem. Although I think that there was a brief time that Arnold reformed (in the DCAU he actually managed to fully break away from his Scarface persona, making him a rare case where not only did Arkham actually do its job properly but it actually STUCK), he tends to be in supervillain mode more often than not.

Harvey, meanwhile, Bruce knew pre-supervillainy, so there's bound to be a touch of bias there.

[icon_uk]

Which again makes me sad that the BTAS never let us see how Dick and Harvey had gotten on before the accident.

As one of Bruce's oldest and closest friends, it strikes me that he had to have visited Wayne Manor a time or two, and would surely have met Dick.

Would they have got on, would they be slightly jealous of each other, would Dick see the "Big Bad Harv" side that Bruce never did? It could have been interesting IMHO.

And in the comics, since they retconned Two-Face's "birth" to being before Dick came to live with Bruce, it's sort of a non-starter.

[randyripoff]

DCAU Two-Face has never even approached the levels of criminality that DC's Two-Face has. All things being equal, I think DCAU Dick would have understood why Bruce was a little more lenient with Harvey, but at the same time I think he would have called Bruce on it if he was being too soft and ignoring his prior crimes.

[icon_uk]

That's pretty much what he did do in a couple of stories, and also in the comics, more in the comics.

It was more the personal side of Dick and Harvey I was wondering about.

[randyripoff]

My guess is something like this:

BW: Dick, I'd like you to meet a very good friend of mine, Harvey Dent.

DG(in the midst of a handstand, eating a banana split): Hwwo.

HD: He's quite athletic.

BW: You should see what he can do on a trapeze. Now let's go to my study and get down to business.

[leoboiko]

I wonder if there were any stories about a Two-Face/Scarface relationship?

(not that kind of relationship, shippers!)

(ok perhaps just a little…)

[rdfox]

See, this is why I love Dini's take on Harley so much. She's crazy, yes. She's dangerous as all hell, too. But inside, she's not a sociopath. And she's still the smart girl who got her doctorate in psychiatry and genuinely DOES know what she's talking about, and has empathy for the mentally ill. (Possibly too much empathy, given how it allowed Joker to manipulate her, but still. And yes, I know, she bedded a professor for grades. But she also specified in the same story that she *could* have gotten the grades on her own; she just used sex to get them to make it easier to balance that and the demands of her gymnastics scholarship AND her having some semblance of a personal life AND certain biological imperatives like "sleeping." She didn't do it because she was stupid; she did it because she had to find a way to pack about 36 hours' work into every day.)

Deep down, she's not a bad person. She's not a GREAT person, and she's not a well person, either, but she's not truly evil. Meaning that you can have these wonderful little moments of lucidity where you see that she genuinely does have people she wants to help, and is sad that she can't help.

And I love that. It makes her loss of agency at Joker's hands all the more tragic, and it also allows her to have runs where not only is she an antihero, but she even manages to (at least temporarily and partially) redeem folks who've crossed the Moral Event Horizon and turn *them* into antiheroes, too--witness her influence on Poison Ivy and how, when Harley is around, Pammy tends to tone things down and stop being so violent, instead moving more towards staking out a patch of turf and enforcing a "nature preserve" mentality, where if humanity leaves her and her plants alone, she'll leave humanity alone. (It was only AFTER a significant amount of time had passed since she and Harley went their separate ways in Harley's series that we got to Ivy killing people without provocation again. It could even be argued that Batman was manipulating the situation in Gotham City Sirens not just to have Selina monitoring and moderating Harley and Ivy, but also to have Harley moderating Ivy...)

The character is at her best when shown in that light. Sadly, it seems that the current DC Editorial can't comprehend characterization more complex than the writing equivalent of flood-fill...

[espanolbot]

It's really one of the great disappointments of the reboot to me really, is that you haveso much characterisation put into, not just people like Harley but the city of Gotham as well, and it was all thrown away for something that doesn't ring as true.

Maybe its just me, but I loved the work that Paul Dini did in his various series' to flesh out the backstory of Gotham and the people living there. Really the only writer who seems to treat Gotham with that sense of history like Dini seems to be Snyder, and with him not all the things he has changed have gone that well.

Such as the Mr Freeze retcon... now, here's the thing, although the DCU version of Mr Freeze took things from Heart of Ice, even before the reboot he was an entirely different animal to the DCAU one. He was a callous bastard before HoI and he was a callous bastard afterwards. People getting upset that he wasn't the same is kind of a bit strange, as the comicbook version was never the "if they only leave me alone I'd cure Nora!" type of antivillian... if only because Nora was killed in the same issue the HoI-influenced Mr Freeze was introduced in.

[lego_joker]

Eh. Dini had some great concepts working for him during his solo run on the comics - don't get me wrong - but the execution kinda blew.

I dunno if it was just Don Kramer's art, but I found Dini's dialogue and sense of pacing to be downright abysmal a lot of times, whether on Tec, Sirens, or Streets (honestly, I simply CANNOT read through Peyton Riley's backstory without nodding off at least once - it reads like Dini just copy-pasted his notes on the character into the script, without even reading through it once). The Arkham games were even worse.

[oddityangel]

Wait, when did she specify her reasons for sleeping with her professor for good grades? The first time I remember it being mentioned is in 'Mad Love,' and in that there was no justification beyond wanting a better grade. Dini is also the one who in Arkham Asylum/City and their tie ins had characters comment on how stupid Harley was.

[espanolbot]

Her solo series expanded on her actually being goo at her job, but her feeling that she needed to sleep with her tutor to secure her grade (guy was kind of a skuzzbucket).

The Harley of the Arkham games is kind of different character, as she's meant to be comic relief for the most part, so she isn't treated as seriously as some of the other characters. This changes in the post-Arkham City DLC though, when she goes utterly nuts.

[geoffsebesta]

The eyes of all these people look terrified. The mouths look predatory.