Detective Comics #23.2 :Harley Quinn

[superfangirl1]

Harley is free of the Suicide Squad and she's having fun in Gotham, but first she has to give out free video game systems to all the boys and girls! Then she dresses up like a cop and visits a police station with quite a bit of dynamite in her car.









Art by: Neil Googe

Comments

[kuronotenshi]

Joker 'controlling' her is part of her origins yes.

But the fact that every DC villain of late seems to have a 'bad upbringing' is reading like a Trope. And the fact they introduce her 'abused child' origins in the same story as they have her killing kids which is also wildly out of character is a question I legitimatly have.

As of rate now, EVERYTHING I am seeing of DC comics villains is that every villain was abused as a child in one way or another, and so they should all be 'sympathetic'. Which...is bull. And a Trope. And an excuse.

There -was- a time in comics where the Joker was just -EVIL-. We didn't need a reason. WE just knew it to be true. We didn't need to know Zod's origins as a child to hear his father be mean to know Zod was bad. Or Darkseid. Or anyone.

I've now seen from scans and previews three Bat-Villains with 'abusive' child hoods. Which doesn't change their villainy, but comes across as 'Well, maybe you'll see them differently'.

As for your original question about removing choice and responsibility....let's go with the age old response from some people of...

"It's not their fault they turned out bad. They didn't have a chance. They had a bad childhood/home life/etc. IT's no surprise."

Yeah, it doesn't -remove- the fact they are a villain, but it sure as crap comes across as an overused writing crutch to make someone 'have a reason' to be evil..instead of -Just being evil-.

[sadoeuphemist]

I don't know why "just being evil" is a good thing, or if it was even true. Zod, for example, there are like half a dozen General Zod's, but the most recent one before the reboot rebelled against an oppressive government and genuinely sought to protect the welfare of Kryptonians. Joker, his most well known origin story is The Killing Joke, where he was a hapless comedian driven mad by misfortune. Bat-villains in particular tend to have been shaped by some trauma in their past - Two-Face, Mr Freeze, Riddler (who was said to have had an abusive childhood), the Scarecrow, Ra's al Ghul - heck, the idea behind Arkham Asylum is that many of Batman's foes are legally insane and thus cannot be held responsible for their actions.

No one is evil "just because." Of course people have reasons for doing the things that they do, that doesn't absolve them of responsibility for doing them.

[kuronotenshi]

I -never- said 'Just being evil' was a good thing.

But it is -MUCH- better than giving the Trope of modern comics..which is...

"Mommy and Daddy were mean to me, so now I hurt people."

And Joker's 'Origin' in Killing Joke...was told by "Joker". That's half the point of it. No one should -ever- know if it was true or not. MAYBE that happend..or MAYBE it was an hallucination. OR MAYBE it was a story he read on the internet because of fans. Regardless.

Plenty of people are evil -"Just Because"-. They may have reasons..but guess what...most of those reasons won't be understandable by others. Which defaults to "Just Because".

My Issue with -Most- of these Forever Evil titles is the trope. They -all- so far fall to the trope of "Someone was mean to me. I got power. I'm mean back."

The only one that -I- have seen that doesn't fall to this is Trigon....

The rest? "I was abused. I gained power over . I fought back. I gained power." Even Harley. IT's sad. It's disgusting. It's a trope.

And it makes me despise DC more.

[md84]

Adding insult to injury, it's not even a trope being used well. A well-written Freudian Excuse let's readers sympathize or at least pity villains while not actually absolving them of responsibility. Not really feeling a lot of sympathy or pity here, just some bile rising in my throat.

[sadoeuphemist]

All of the backstories you are talking about are also being told by their respective villains. And in any case, Joker's backstory served to make him sympathetic, because he genuinely believed it to be true at the time. Someone who is that deluded about their own past is not "just evil", they are mentally ill and need help.

I really want to hear examples of these "just evil" people you are talking about. I mean, I'll give you Darkseid, but give me an example of a person who was "just evil" for no comprehensible reason, besides a literal God of Evil or a demon or something metaphysical like that.

[icon_uk]

Picking names as they occur to me

James Gordon Jr.?

Mr Zsasz?

The current Trickster? (No origin that I know of, so his being a lethal level criminal seems to be something he aspires to be "just because")

In the MU we'd have Empath who they later retconned in his "building up a wall between him and other people" but originally he was a sadistic monster because he could get away with it and enjoyed the thrill of control.

[sadoeuphemist]

Part of the horror of Gordon Jr. was the Commissioner's fear that he had in some way been responsible for fundamentally damaging his son, that his kidnapping as an infant had left him brain damaged. In any case, James was on medication for psychopathy, which points to a medical reason behind his behavior.

Mr. Zsasz suffered from depression following his parents' deaths and felt his life was hollow and worthless and was about to commit suicide before he found purpose in killing.

Trickster I have no idea what his deal is so I can't say either way, and Empath I have never heard of at all, so maybe?

[q99]

Major difference- Most of those traumas happened as adults. Joker the comedian was an adult. Harvey's acid was as an adult. They, as adults, chose to respond to a bad event in bad ways.

Child abuse as the primary source of villains has some implications I'm not fond of.

[sadoeuphemist]

Two-Face was abused as a child. Riddler, as I said, was abused as a child. Scarecrow was hideously bullied and harassed as a child, I dunno what his family life was like.

If you read the scans, Harley's dysfunctional home life led her to value order and drove her to excel. It was only later, as an adult, after meeting the Joker, that she decided order was bullshit and became a supervillain.

[md84]

I rather like the BTAS episode with the Arkham inmates putting Batman on trial for "making" them into criminals. It ended with the idea that yeah, their histories might have influenced their gimmicks, but they were all still fundamentally bad people.

I think the appeal of the Freudian Excuse is that it offers an easy solution to evil. If only we could remove this one thing from our lives -- violent videogames, rock music, guns, bowling, etc. -- then evil will go away. Too bad that's a load of crap since people have been preying on each other long before any of those things existed.

Edit:

I think the one good thing about giving villains these cookie-cutter sob stories that "excuse" their villainy is that it gives the relatively saner heroes a chance to call them out on their bs.

[sadoeuphemist]

I think that's a fundamental misreading of the episode. The point was that Batman specifically was not responsible for creating the villains. But the series as a whole was remarkably sympathetic towards the villains. Mr Freeze and the Riddler were screwed over by their employers, Clayface was a victim of a mob boss, Mad Hatter was sympathetic and just plain pathetic, Penguin once went straight but turned back to crime after being mocked and disdained by society, etc.

[md84]

He did have a hand in influencing their gimmicks, but the DA argued that they, or at least people like them, actually created Batman. If Batman didn't show up, they might not have become costumed villains, but they would still be villains.

This series did the Freudian Excuse right. It gave the villains pathos while denying them absolution for their crimes.

[sadoeuphemist]

Yes, and that's absolving Batman of their creation. But if Daggett didn't blackmail and attempt to murder Hagen, he wouldn't have become Clayface. If Boyle hadn't denied Fries' attempts to save his wife, he wouldn't have become Mr. Freeze, etc.

How are the scans above in any way an "absolution" for Harley Quinn? Because she had a dysfunctional family? She literally blows up a bunch of children at the end, it is not an attempt to make her seem sympathetic.

[md84]

It doesn't, true. But it also fails to make her at all sympathetic, so it takes it too far the other way. Unless that was the point. Baiting the reader into sympathizing with her, only for her to do something gut wrenchingly awful and make us feel bad for ever liking her.

And while Hagen and Fries are sympathetic because others turned them into monsters, they still chose to pursue revenge while endangering the lives of others.

[sadoeuphemist]

So... have you just completely reversed your position? The villains are not "fundamentally bad people", and had they not been "turned into monsters" by outside forces, they would not have become evil.

[md84]

Other people turned them into monsters on the outside, but the way they responded to that made them monsters on the inside too, albeit somewhat pitiful ones. Ultimately, it was a choice.

That was the point the DA made in that episode. Regardless of whatever circumstances, including meeting Batman, led to them being costumed villains, they all likely would still be out there causing pain and misery to others. They were responsible for their own messed up lives. Even the "jury" admitted this was true.

Okay, so maybe it's less "Fundamentally bad people" and more "they made bad choices".

[janegray]

Hear hear.

[lego_joker]

Ehhh... I've never liked that episode. People have said that it was originally the pitch for the first BTAS movie, and I so wish that it had been kept that way. Trying to cover the issues that episode did in a single half-hour simply isn't done.

And the central issue it tried to tackle - whether Batman "makes" his villains - is a question that's insanely dependent on what continuity you're following. For instance, at that point in the comics, Ivy's entire criminal career more or less started because she was an obsessive Batman fan. In BTAS? It's because of Harvey Dent and an extinct rose. I suppose that it could have been taken as an answer to the issue within the confines of BTAS, but not for the Bat-mythos as a whole.

There's also the fact that most of the villains with the strongest claims to Batman "making" them don't testify. Two-Face's scarring in BTAS, for instance, came about because Batman knocked a thug's gunfire off-target, triggering a chain of explosions. Joker at that point didn't really have an origin, but since BTAS was a cash-in on the Burton films, I think they expected audiences to know/believe that Batman had punched a mob hitman into a vat of chemicals (which was later confirmed in The New Batman Adventures). Instead, who DO they get to testify? Ivy and the Mad Hatter, two villains with far weaker ties to Batman.

The whole thing just comes off as one big Strawman-burning festival, TBH.