Suicide Squad New52 #15

#15 Joker puts his back out!

This cover has always annoyed me. For one thing, Harley's pose.. as usual, is awkward as hell and she's wearing that painted on vinyl. Her eye make-up is not it's usual black but that weird blue colour it turns when the artist no longer cares about the image. Joker meanwhile looks like his stupid stapled on face is having an epiphany about how stupid this whole thing is. At least he's in his purple suit and not that stupid mechanic's outfit, I guess.

The headline is "psychos in love!" like any of that is correct, and they're in an oddly shaped circle while playing cards of the other losers fall around them.

Now, if you'll recall the last issue of Suicide Squad # 14 - Harley had just been chain-choked in a dick 'to be continued' moment, and that was just after the events of Batman #14.











Where it actually fits into continuity is beyond me because this means that right after dissing Joker and having a strange heart to heart with Batman - Harley wanders off to where she knows Joker is and has been watching. Then at some stage, Batman blows his way out of the chemical vat but this is neither seen nor heard in Suicide Squad #15 - where both Joker and Harley are revealed to still be chilling at ACE Chemicals. Joker has also found time to juggle having torture porn with Harley and being at the Gotham reservoir taunting Batman?

Speaking of torture porn, Harley is less than two minutes into chain strangulation and chill when she decides to reminisce on how great and historical Joker is while in the meantime a wide variety of rats close in on her half dead body.

Aren't there healthier things to eat, rats? Like.. sewerage debris? Poison? 

Oh, she's not dead just passed out. Enough to be dragged from the bowels of the factory to what I presume is a few stories higher? Since when does Joker have the strength for that?
Anyway, she hallucinates he's the classic Joker while telling him she had an awful dream, and he was there, and she was there, then he reveals himself to be new shitty Joker. His eyes are still acid green, not the messed up half white half blue they are in the other comics.

So... he's got Harley tied to a stretcher, straight-jacketed, teetering on the edge of a convenient hole in the floor that drops down into another vat of acid. Damn, this guy is a one trick pony. Making a sidekick? Vat of acid. Killing Batman? Vat of acid. Killing sidekick? Vat of acid. Relaxing afternoon with the family? Vat of acid. Change the frickin' record!
Why is this even his plan? He couldn't even kill Harley the first time, what the hell is it going to do to her this time around??

.................................................................................um, let's hope and pray not.




Meanwhile, Yo-Yo and Waller are watching the Joker through a convenient bio-contact lens that was placed in Harley's eye and sharing the popcorn. Hmm, much like a movie of the week drama.
Waller reveals that it was her that had Harley shipped to Belle Reeve/Reve after Harley had killed a bunch of lawyers (that Waller kindly refers to as losers) because she knew Joker would come after her and she wanted to plan for it.

All of these panels are slanty as hell. 

NOW Waller's bitching about Harley Quinn when she was comatose after being shot make sense!
Well, sorta. As much as this comic can make sense. Waller spouts some other bullshit about the Joker needing Harley and her approval, which, yeah I could probably believe in her previous incarnation where it was shown he hated the fact that he realised he did love Harley, and then tried to kill her.

Again, we haven't seen enough of the relationship in the New52 to make any statements like this, especially from the few slivers we've been fed are all Joker being all 'nuh nuh nuh I made you'.
I suppose someone had to take credit for New52 Harley Quinn and even the writers ducked out on this one. Nice!

This page here.... well, you just have to read the whole thing for yourself and witness it.

Panel 1: Joker managing to hold a stretcher - with a dead weight human strapped on it and almost vertical - from falling into the pit even though there's barely any stretcher itself on the ground. 

Joker's arm has some weird... broken looking bulge in it. He should get that looked at. 

Panel 2: Harley inexplicably gets her legs free - and seemingly manages to remove the lower leg straps entirely - while now keeping the stretcher horizontal. Joker is now straddling the stretcher, nothing is keeping Harley there apart from her legs. 

Panel 3: Little hard to see, but Harley is near vertical again, Joker is losing balance. 

Panel 4: Instead of falling in headfirst, Joker manages to slip straight down and somehow catches the back of his shirt on a previously unseen rock. This small tear on a shitty shirt is now supporting both Joker and Harley's weight. Harley has also managed to extract her upper body from the straps... some...how... which lets the stretcher plummet below. 

Panel 5: Harley's ankles aren't even crossed but she's still maintaining her hold on Joker's neck. She also manages to straight up tear her arms out of the straight jacket somehow. It's more clear here that the rock Joker's shirt is caught on is actually on the flat part of the ground BEHIND him and therefore SHOULD have been visible in earlier shots. 

Panel 6: Harley somehow flips out of this and lands *perfectly* without the motion causing the Joker's jumpsuit to tear, or for her to bumble the whole thing and fall into acid herself. How many gymnasts can flip themselves up vertically like that and travel that far up, up and away after removing the one thing keeping them from defying gravity?

I know you need some suspension of disbelief when reading comic but do we have to suspend ALL OF IT AT ONCE?!

Then after this ridiculous page of shenanigans, the DC New 52 feels free to continue shitting on my favourite characters. Oh, I'm not talking about Harley Quinn right this second, but rather Bud and Lou, her beloved hyenas.

Or I think these are supposed to be them. I don't think the artist knows much about hyenas because one second they're the size of dogs then the next they look more like weasels. They also lack the spots that Bud and Lou have always had before.

In any case, DC found it fit to kill off Bud and Lou.. or rather, make Harley kill them after Joker infects them with rabies. So... um... where exactly were the hyenas until now?
That's pretty great timing for animals who by now should be a bit more impaired in the mobility department........ OH WAIT.

To their surprise, whereas rabies proved virulent to bat-eared foxes and white-tailed mongooses, for example, spotted hyenas in many cases eliminated the virus from their bodies or else apparently carried low viral loads and experienced no ill effects.
Scientific American: Hyenas carry rabies but don't develop symptoms
By Kate Wong on December 12, 2001

Harley can visibily tell that HER hyenas have rabies though, and they drool and bite her.
Joker mistakes a virus for pure animal instinct. Um, no. That's not really how it works.




Any behaviour is instinctive if it is performed without being based upon prior experience (that is, in the absence of learning), and is therefore an expression of innate biological factors. Sea turtles, newly hatched on a beach, will automatically move toward the ocean. A marsupial climbs into its mother's pouch upon being born. Honeybees communicate by dancing in the direction of a food source without formal instruction. Other examples include animal fighting, animal courtship behaviour, internal escape functions, and the building of nests.

Instincts are inborn complex patterns of behaviour that exist in most members of the species, and should be distinguished from reflexes, which are simple responses of an organism to a specific stimulus, such as the contraction of the pupil in response to bright light or the spasmodic movement of the lower leg when the knee is tapped. The absence of volitional capacity must not be confused with an inability to modify fixed action patterns.Wikipedia "instinct"

Joker also states that pain and emotion are removed in this state... which is why it's sooo good and Harley should totally join him! But wait, that sounds like emotion! As did Joker's fear when he was about to topple into the acid. Joker may consider himself fully realised, but he's not very smart.

Anyway, Harley's colours, breast size, eye make-up and the material her boots are made of fluctuate wildly as she kills her hyenas and listens to Joker prattle on about some shit or something. 

They have a sad excuse for a fight scene.. where the notoriously weak in a fight Joker manages to block, fight back, subdue and then bite Harley's ear. Harley bleeds black ink all over her pasty shoulders. She stumbles over to a burning furnace thing..puts her bare hand on the metal there, has the strength to pull the door off via a handle that isn't even there and smash it into the Joker's face.. 

Where was her fighting power before? 

Here it is! She smashes Joker's head into an orange abyss. 

Then has this bizarrely dramatic turn around where she had time to switch her gauntlets. 

One has to assume she thought he was unconscious, I guess? Double tap, people. Always double tap. 

Oh no, turns out the ear bite was just a distraction, now she's been poisoned or ..something.. 

wait, is she not immune? I know she's not as awesome as she used to be but what? She skips out of Joker rain, survives Joker acid and gets taken down by a Joker bite? Da heck?

Joker and Harley share this moment before she bites his tongue off.. oh look, he felt pain! Hahaha!

It's okay, this likely won't affect Joker's speech or anything else he does in DOTF. 

See, he's able to flying kick take down Harley.. and then drag her upstairs.. to the basement.. 

upstairs to the... aww for hell's bells! This comic can't even maniac right!

Argh, Harley's non existent thighs really bug me, but I can't tell if I hate THAT more or the fact that no way ho say the Joker has enough physical ability to a) beat Harley (even this shitty Harley) in a fight or b) drag her entire body weight.

Hasn't he generally been defined by his use of tricks and toys instead of getting physical?

Here's our next stupid scene..

Few things here. One, Joker takes the time to remove Harley's gauntlets before chaining her to the wall. Two, is Joker showing his age here or the fact that he REEEEEEAAALLLY gets around? Not sure. Three: guess how many times we'll see this fun factor again in the New52~!

Yeah that's right. They took what made Harley unique - a person who could actually LOVE the Joker - and decided that wasn't enough. There had to be PREVIOUS Harley Quinns, who presumably also had convenient names like Harleen Quinzel and were lucky enough to be dip dyed into red/blue colours. 

Joker says he won't kill her but then says she'll die in here. So.. that's still death by Joker, right?

The hell is he talking about making her a martyr? Does he even know what a martyr is? 

Does anyone know what anything is in this comic, let alone the readers?

Next thing we know, Harley has managed to WALK back to Louisiana from G-D Gotham Frickin' City, and even though she may or may not have broken her wrists somehow getting out of the shackles and then the dungeon door.. she's put her gauntlets back on. 

Also Belle Reeve/Reve apparently has no perimeter security so if Waller hadn't been walking her Boomerang who knows how long Harley would have been blowing bubbles in her own blood. 

Oh yeah and Deadshot's not dead. Who would have guessed. I see he gets to wear clothes though... interesting that Harley didn't. 

I also like that they were like OMG call Waller, Deadshot's like, alive and stuff! When yeah.. aside from all the experiments and things.. you kinda didn't bury him very well. 

The Short End of the Jester Schtick

Look, this comic is a mess. I actually enjoyed how ridiculous the earlier issues were but this one takes itself way too seriously. This is supposed to be some big cathartic moment for Harley but it's absolutely meaningless when you realise she's done all of this stuff before.. and it actually meant something. It had an impact. Here, it's just violence and sadism just for the sake of being edgy. For extra cringe, it features what could be the most annoying Joker ever.

Remember when he was something to be feared? Now he's just that one over zealous fanboy who has to keep harping on about how he's moved beyond the ordinary crazy and how he's something NEW and INSPIRED. It's not good.

One thing I will say for this comic is that compared to the last few, there's been an obvious effort put into the backgrounds so that our main characters are no longer floating around in blankly coloured limbo rooms. Any good this does is ruined by the lack of attention to the details in the forefront.

Like.. oh, I know I always say this but... HARLEY'S COSTUME. For the love of sweet snacks, why is it so hard to keep this stupid, piece of shit outfit consistent? Hmm, I think I just answered my own question but I'm still comedically angry right now.

The room of defunct Harley's was sooo stupid, that and the stretcher scene was just pushing it beyond the uppermost reaches of stupidity. And come on, does no one work in or at least investigate ACE Chemicals anymore? I feel like Batman would at least hire someone to do it like he does for everything else.

Wotta Comedian! 

Harley: Well, aren't you a peach? There are a ton of things I hate about myself, but my face isn't one of them. So, I think I'll keep that. 

Joker: The chemicals didn't alter you like they did me. They just gave you an excuse. A way for your mind to justify your actions. 

Joker: Now, hold still. This will only hurt like hell 'til I cut through the dermis layer of your skin. 

Joker: Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Excuse me. It seems I've lost my face. 

Harley: ...but because I love you doesn't mean I belong with you. So, I think we should break up. 

Boomerang: ...It was nice doing business with you, Waller. 
Waller: It was a means to an end, but in no way nice or business. 

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