Harley Quinn: Future's End

Release Date: September 24, 2014




Harley and The Joker make it legal at last! Follow the happy couple to their secret honeymoon spot, where it’s literally till death do they part!

Alright! For anyone still struggling to cope with Bane-Harley and her subsequent demise in the Suicide Squad Futures End - fear not! In this comic book, the world is still happy and colourful! Harley Quinn is still alive and her.... normal? self. Well, close enough I guess.

I personally believe that it has the best 3D motion cover out of them all, even though I'm not a fan of Conner's art style. In this case, I feel like they really made the most of the lenticular covers and showed a stark change between fantasy and  reality. Close runners up are Wonder Woman and Batwoman and the Suicide Squad one. The rest are kinda meh. Anyway, even if Harley's cover sucked it's still better than that crappy villain's month turd lenTURDiclar cover!

Now the story itself isn't the best,  and in my opinion it starts REALLY lazily with Harley deciding she needs a vacation so she hurriedly posts herself in a crate to kick start the story.

I kinda get they're going for a slapstick Looney Tunes style gimmick but hey, remember when Harley had standards for herself and her lifestyle instead of just sticking it out in a crate with some cured meats for days on end with a bunch of animals.  Like - I've heard the TSA is pretty bad but surely this is an extreme way to avoid them.

Also, don't people presumably check the cargo hold?

Well, maybe they will once idiot here starts yelling at the top of her lungs to the captain when the plane inevitably hits turbulence a few panels down. She wakes up on a desert island with runny eye shadow, but don't worry because it gets fixed further down the page. Of course. 

Presumably the other animals in the cargo hold didn't make it, but Harley is more concerned with her lost beaver and insulting the one surviving animal, a dog she fed bacon to for some reason. This dog makes the wise choice to save it's career and run out of this comic. Ultimate pupper. 

She replaces Bernie with a face drawn on a soccer ball because THAT parody hasn't been done to death. I haven't even seen the movie and I know what she's on about.. buuut in case it's too subtle a reference Harley helpfully makes a joke about calling it Wilson. This is, of course pretty lame but at least it's better than her cannibalism jokes. Well, not that they're jokes per se, but more of a threat should she actually find other survivors and/or condiments. Yes, we have the classic stranded on a deserted island schtick but then she's like drooling about finding civilisation/tourist hot spots so she can get a purple people eater fix even if these people are literally at a resort with restaurants, and not in the middle of butt funky nowhere starving to death. Also, she never considers that they might eat HER which is stupid, plus she could at least have pulled out the classic cannibals eating clown/tastes funny joke .. but that would generally require her to be funny. SIGH.

Anyway,  she stumbles along and finds Bernie's skull (this is a massive improvement looks wise) and wears it around. You know,  the next few panels revolve around Harley and Bernie 'talking' in their heads and confirming they each know/see what the other does,  which makes Bernie questioning Harley's Mr. T reference even less funny than it would be otherwise. 

So Harley encounters some natives, and when they indicate she could be a goddess, she does nothing but encourage this idea and then continues to take advantage of them by making them hand feed her before having the most sexually objectify-able male warriors oiled up and then made to fight to the death for her amusement.

There is something a little bit off about the whitest person in the universe taking such blatant advantage of a native tribe in their own land... and more so when we're encouraged to laugh at it.

Plus wasn't there that time in the Suicide Squad where that dodgy Mayan/Aztec thing happened? You know, where they were welcomed but then drugged and set up to be eaten themselves? Did she learn nothing during this time?

Remember how Harley was an Olympic level gymnast boosted by Poison Ivy powers? Yeah, well, the New52 definitely revoked this because she can't even walk 148 steps up a knock off Aztec ziggurat before making her newfound slaves carry her more than half of the way up. It's kinda weird that the comic spends an absurd amount of time on this whole stair thing, like, more than the shoehorned travel bit at the start and a lot more than the resolution of the comic amongst other things. In saying that...

Probably the weirdest thing about this comic is how oblivious Harley is to everything. Not only to how
obnoxious she is being, but at the camp ground there is literally a man wearing a knock off Batman hood and cape.  She's sitting next to furniture fashioned in Joker style. She talks to a guy wearing a Joker headdress. She's told about their new king (named  Tha'Jo-Kaa .... yes) and how he has the same skin tone as her, and that he has told the tribe SPECIFICALLY about her. She notes someone was crazy enough to build the temple and wonders who it could be.

There's foreshadowing, and then there's standing entirely in the fore's shadow with the only light being a huge neon sign stating "THIS IS RELEVANT - PLEASE PAY ATTENTION!!" 

To no-one's surprise, it's the Joker! Well, Harley and Joker are surprised,  but that's only because the plot called for it and these two are written like complete numbskulls by the... 'authors.' 

Harley launches into Joker's arms and kisses him before kicking him for making her believe he was dead. Joker explains how he took over the island to get away from the Death of the Family backlash, but grew bored and ended up making a native knockoff off the Justice League to chase him down,  but ultimately as they revered Joker, they would not hurt him and this resulted in Joker killing them.  

There's a line added in about how the natives enjoy blood sport but that seems like a cheap way to get around the earlier oily death grapple disguised as a bizarrely out of place lover's tiff. Speaking of lovers, there is to be a marriage tomorrow.  Harley imagines a Disney-esque scene with a tailored gown being administered by happy singing animals. The rude awakening to find out that she's going to wear a coconut bikini, a grass skirt and a headband that looks like a rolled up pink towel is quite possibly the funniest panel in the comic.

Seriously though, this biyatch first imagines her friends engineered a plane crash, possibly killing dozens of people and almost drowning her in the process, to throw her a surprise party? Then she dreams about this perfect wedding dress that fits first time and is on the island that she didn't even know she was going to be on and also didn't know she was going to be married? I get it's a dream sequence, but these hack writers treat her dreams as part of the story, so there's a sin for that. Also the magically appearing and disappearing necklace. Ding! 

Anyway, they head up to the volcano for the ceremony and Bernie states 'his' doubts about Joker which was a bit confusing for me because it made me try to place where this '5 years from now' actually is in relation to the 'then' comic. More on that later.

Bernie - one of my least favourite character's in the New52 Harley Quinn's endless parade of one note characters and stereotypes - is actually useful as being Harley's inner voice piece. I'm still happy when he gets chucked into the alligator river and eaten again. Stupid stuffed piece o' crap. I still don't like you, Bernie.






The ceremony is very Western, which is weird, and so is the fact that this tribe provide fitted sheets and pillows for their guest's bedrooms, and parade past alligator streams. Granted, I'd rather meet an comparatively tame American alligator than an Australian crocodile but still, both are best avoided.

Sudden plot twist that shouldn't shock anyone who's watched a movie or read a book involving a 'deserted' island with a tribe eager to accept a foreign ruler and a restless volcano in the last 100 or so years but whatever. Joker plans to 'wed' Harley and then have her thrown into the volcano as a soothing sacrifice, but then another 'surprise' plot twist occurs when he has to also be thrown in for some convoluted reason.

Hilarity abounds when Joker gets kicked in the nads and some native whimpers and grabs his privates. Oddly enough, no one whimpers for the almost Batman who gets 'smackeroo'd' into the volcano. In fact, the natives look either vaguely shocked or bored or completely vanish in panels. The comic is much more interested in showing us the brief truce between Joker and Harley before the volcano explodes and this happens.

And I thought the crate thing from the start was a lazy way to get from one place to the other!

Wow. Then if that's not enough we get a shoe-horned cameo from an Aquaman who is too embarrassed to show his face on screen or confirm his name. 

The short End of the Jester Schtick

Probably the only thing I would really compliment this issue on is the art work.

Honestly, it isn't even my cup of tea and it's hella weird seeing the old red/black widow's peak hair do with bangs that go missing every other panel. HOWEVER, you can't deny that Chad Hardin is able to capture Harley's emotions well, the colours are great, the art is clean and doesn't take minutes of head scratching to understand what they're trying to convey... also Harley's physique is nice. 

As in, she's not the elongated monstrosity we normally see, her size and shape is consistent, her muscles flex when she uses them and despite spending the entire issue in a bikini of sorts, she's not over-sexualised. 

Characterisation wise, Harley disappoints. Granted, she's not as poisonous as usual, but she's a hard person to root for when she's so self absorbed and obnoxious. Joker was a nice surprise - for the most part he seemed like himself. I feel like the comic - like the thing with the stairs - spent too long going over Joker's Justice League wet dreams but whatever. 

As a couple... some bits reminded me of a regurgitated Mad Love but it was hard to stomach since even in comic they refer to the Death of the Family - where after that face slicing unfunny Joker finally pushed the New52 Harley to abandon him. Now she's just running right back into his arms? Makes it seem like they're making fun of Classic Harley, but they also need to remember that Classic Harley invented splitting from the Joker and she frequently had the backbone to actually stand up to him. 

The ending was.. well, really crammed in there wasn't it? Still, had the comic gone on any longer this review would have surely gotten more scathing so there's that. I don't think the writers understand the difference between cross promotion and Easter Eggs but it all comes off as shoe horned and not natural. This may be the one Harley Quinn issue where I didn't mind the Obligatory Dream/Hallucination Sequence. 

Wotta Comedian!

Harley: What are you doing?!? Are you tryin' ta jinx us?
Joker: Aw, c'mon, precious. What's the worst that could happen?
(volcano rumbles)
Joker: ...Rumble?

Harley: Now look what you did!
Joker: Me? Everything was fine before you got here.

Harley: My dress! My husband! MY DRESS!

Harley: That's my wedding dress? Where the hell are my singing wardrobe animals?

Harley: Waitaminit. The final drop into Mukaka? Is that a metaphor for when I die of old age?

Harley: Get'cher hands offa me or I swear I'll rip that smug face right offa you.
Joker: Been there *ow* Done that.

Joker: Ouch. That looks like it smarts.
Harley: Mukaka doodle don't.

Bonus Panels!