"It's a Horrible Life!"

[lordultimus]

Comments

[alicemacher]

If nothing else, this story was worth it for the hilarious mental image of a Dick Sprang-rendered Joker with his own line of gluten-free chicken nuggets.

[chalicother]

It's weird to think that anyone would be okay with Harley tying up Babs and Commissioner Gordon at the end of this.

It's wrong for Harley to do this in general, but doing it to established characters, including one who is Batgirl...is odd. Especially if this was when she was Oracle. That's just an odd and beats the purpose for anyone who is not into completely evil and crazed Harley.

[lordultimus]

It's the problem with DC trying to market Harley as a villain and a hero at the same time. Harley in the comics is now in an endless circle where she starts out independent from the Joker but still a proud supervillain, then she starts to feel regret and starts to do good things (usually involving taking care of a little kid), then decides to become a hero and earns the trust of DC heroes, then somehow everyone forgets all this and Harley is once again an unrepentant supervillain threatening heroes' loved ones while making silly jokes.

Unless something absolutely drastic happens to her status quo, such as joining the Justice League, hooking up with the Joker again, or losing her popularity dramatically, I don't see this cycle breaking anytime soon.

[alicemacher]

Eh, by the same token would Heaven be okay with an angel trying to earn his wings by making someone feel good about being bad? Of course not. But this is just meant to be a light, silly story, a twisted parody of an (admittedly overused) Christmas story, not Grimdark Tales of Grim, Dark Gotham. Note too that Barbara and Jim at the end look annoyed rather than frightened or traumatized.

[zachbeacon]

Considering her ex's history with the Gordon's, it's so much worse.

[zachbeacon]

Wait, isn't Karen-Harley from Superboy Prime's Earth now that the worlds have been shuffled around?

Also, I know they like to have their cake and eat it too RE the size of the multiverse (infinite in theory but they really only count 52 of them) but having the Crime Syndicate and Justice Lords Earths as primary worlds seems redundant.

[lordultimus]

Yes, that's the joke: in a world with no superpowers, Harley is a realtor.

In fairness to the latter, this is because of including the DCAU as its own Earth, which also established the Justice Lords as being a separate Earth. (Though the fact that the Joker isn't lobotomized shows that they're not exactly trying to follow that Earth to the letter.

[zachbeacon]

I mean, you'd think an evil Harley from a "normal" world would be writing trashy pop psychiatry books about serial killers only to fall for one of them.

The thing about the DCAU and comics is, most of the comic tie-ins don't actually tie into the real DCAU anyway. You'll get a JLU story in a comic that gets contradicted by the show. It seems like the only thing the various Batman Beyond comics over the years have in common is that they DO count the BB show and they DON'T count every other BB comics series. Then, on the TV side, there's Static Shock which was firmly outside the DCAU until it wasn't and that wasteland with the JSA knockoffs. What I'm saying is, any attempts to fold in the DCAU will need to odd a lot more than just the two ("good" and "bad") worlds.

[stubbleupdate]

Did Sy get his start in the cartoon, or was he in the comics first?