The Hidden Story of Harley Quinn and How She Became the Superhero World's Most Successful Woman

Earlier her Birds of Casualty arc, Harley has a storied past. Photograph: Photo analogy by Jed Egan. Images courtesy DC Entertainment.

It's been a wild few years for Harley Quinn and her admirers. When we first published this article in Feb of 2015, Margot Robbie had just recently been cast as the iconic DC Comics character for the and so-upcoming picture showSuicide Team. When the motion picture was released in July of 2016, information technology received near-universal panning from critics, merely Robbie'due south performance was often isolated as its sole bright spot: Equally one review put it , "It'southward Robbie who displays the virtually thrilling superpower of all: turning into a movie star while having a gonzo blast swinging a baseball bat and tossing off naughty, gum-snapping one-­liners." Meanwhile, in comics, Harley Quinn has connected to exist a driving force for DC'south sales, regularly starring in her own series while likewise making plentiful appearances elsewhere. Now, she has her ain R-rated cartoon on DC's streaming platform, DC Universe, and — perhaps well-nigh of import — is virtually to return to the large screen as the lead character in the cumbersomely titledBirds of Prey (and the First-class Emancipation of Ane Harley Quinn), played again by Robbie. Information technology seems you tin't go on a proficient weirdo down. (Well, a mostly proficient weirdo. She'due south even so a long style away from Wonder Adult female.) With the new picture nearly to debut, we thought it would be a good opportunity to revisit her story, so that anybody from the diehards to the but Quinn-curious can familiarize themselves with the character'due south fascinating origins, evolution, and deeper meaning.

The comics industry is in the midst of a golden age for admirable female role models. Every few months, nosotros go more serial starring women worth looking up to: superheroes who piece of work to fight sexism in the workplace by 24-hour interval and evil past night, hard-boiled detectives who battle to avert crises both public and personal, teenagers trying to build a kinder world free of prejudice. But there's a fly in the ointment, and she's wearing clown makeup.

Harley Quinn is the acknowledged female grapheme in comics, and she's casually homicidal, gleefully amoral, and mentally unbalanced. There was a time when she was a mental-health professional person, but she shredded her Hippocratic Adjuration when she hopped into bed with a mass-murdering, psychopathic patient and began a criminal offense spree that would make Bonnie and Clyde wince. In the 22 years since she kickoff entered our earth equally a one-off character in a Batman cartoon, she'south occasionally fabricated the world a better place — but it'south usually by accident and never for truth, justice, and the American Way.

No ane could have predicted that Harley would last beyond her showtime appearance, much less become the title character in a series that cracks the all-time-seller charts every calendar month. Her real-world path to icon condition is baroque and unprecedented in the superhero ecosystem. But here she is: Jewish, queer, morally questionable, securely imperfect, and dearest by millions. The company that owns her, DC Entertainment, has alleged February 2015 to be "Harley Quinn Month," and at present is the perfect time for united states of america to ask whether Wonder Woman is comics' biggest female icon anymore. (And, if Harley's superfans are to be believed, she'due south even more than of a feminist character than the venerable Amazon.) Here, and so, is the strange, hidden story of Harley Quinn, the superhero world'due south nigh successful adult female — who she is and how she came to be.

Writer Paul Dini is credited equally the creator of Harley, and that'south technically true. He came upwards with the graphic symbol while he was writing for the acclaimed Batman: The Animated Series in the early '90s. Just the true origins of Harley Quinn prevarication years earlier, in the mind of the extra who voiced her on the cartoon: Arleen Sorkin.

In 1987, Sorkin was a regular on the soap opera Days of Our Lives, playing the prove'southward comic relief: the ditzy, leggy, Noo Yawk–accented Calliope Jones. But unlike her flighty character, Sorkin was a skilled and experienced comedy writer. "I could never just come up in and run my lines," she told Vulture. "I was forever suggesting stuff, probably out of colorlessness!" And so when she went to a screening of the faux-medieval The Princess Bride, an thought struck her: Why non practise a fairy-tale dream sequence on Days? The producers were into it and aired an episode in which Calliope acts as a court jester, roller-skating into a throne room and doing some hackneyed borscht belt gags for a royal family unit.

Dini and Sorkin were college friends, and ane twenty-four hours, she gave him a VHS tape of her favorite Days moments — including her jester scrap. The record sat idle for years. Merely in mid 1991, Dini was ill as a canis familiaris and popped the tape into his VCR. He was a budding television writer at the time, cranking out freelance scripts for the as-even so-unaired Batman: The Animated Series. He'd been struggling to come up upward with a female character to utilize equally a one-off in an episode about Batman'south archnemesis, the Joker.

"I thought,Perhaps there should be a daughter in that location," he said. "And I thought, Should the daughter be similar a tough street thug? Or like a hench-person or something? And then suddenly the thought of someone funny kind of struck me." When he saw Sorkin in clown makeup, the pieces fell into place, and he came upwardly with a silly piddling sidekick. He gave her the comic-book-y proper noun of Harley Quinn, sketched out an thought for her wait, and brought the sketch to the cartoon'southward lead artist, Bruce Timm.

"He did do a crude design for her, which was, bluntly, not very good," Timm recalled. "It had a weird '60s kind of vibe to it. It was just odd. Charming, but odd. I thought we could improve on that. Then I immediately started researching traditional harlequin gear and did kind of a simplified super-villain version of that. It was always intended to be merely a one-off." Still, Timm was — and is — a perfectionist and labored to give this cameo character a distinctive expect: a ruby-and-black full-torso jumpsuit adorned with playing-card diamonds, ruffled cuffs, and a dual-pronged jester'southward cap.

Dini invited Sorkin to tape the vox for the character she'd inspired. Sorkin had left Days of Our Lives and was game for some work, especially if information technology but involved a few hours in a recording studio. She was committed on the microphone but didn't put a whole lot of work into training. "I picked a vox that came easily," she said. Information technology was, in essence, her own voice: loftier-nasal, sing-vocal-y, and filled with Brooklyn-ish inflections.

"It is to laugh, huh, Mistah J?" Harley says to the Joker in her starting time-ever line of dialogue in that fateful 1992 episode "Joker'southward Favor." Right away in that  rhetorical question, we become some of the elements that have stood at Harley's core ever since. For one, she's full of nicknames and delightfully early-20th-century idioms ("It is to express mirth," in this context, basically ways "Ain't that the truth"). Nearly important, she's immediately expressing a kind of sycophantic devotion for superhero fiction's preeminent bad guy.

Only she was more than just a plot device, fifty-fifty in that outset episode. Certain, she was partially an homage to the villains' molls from the campy '60s Batman Idiot box prove, only Harley wasn't content to exist eye candy. "Hey, saccharide, you wanna read me my rights?" a cop asks her at i point. "You have the right to remain silent!" she barks, earlier she kicks him in the shin, hard, and mutters, "Jerk." She's fifty-fifty aware of the gender stereotypes that a viewer might saddle her with: During the episode's climax, Harley plays on Batman'due south paternalism in an attempt to distract him, making doe eyes and saying, "I know, you're thinking, What a shame! A poor, innocent, petty thing similar her, led off-target by bad companions!" (She then grabs a knife and tries to stab him.) She's also straight-upwardly delightful: an acrobatic sprite, prone to shouts, disguises, and reciting poems before her dominate tries to murder police officers.

Cartoons have no single auteur, and the minds that contributed to "Joker'southward Favor" were every bit shocked as anyone when they saw what they'd created. "When that showtime episode she appeared in came back from overseas and nosotros saw her animated, with the combo of the visual and Arleen Sorkin's performance, y'know, information technology was kind of magical," Timm said. "Paul started immediately planning her render and saying, 'Y'know what? I'one thousand gonna bring that Harley Quinn character back."

Dini didn't just bring her dorsum. Over the next seven years, Dini, Timm, and Sorkin congenital Harley into 1 of the most memorable Batman characters of all time. That was no small trick, given that the Batman mythos was already more than 50 years quondam and had featured the same general cast of archetypes for decades. It was made all the more than remarkable by the fact that she didn't even exist in the mainstream Batman comics of the time — it was all happening on a kids' TV show and its spinoff products. And fifty-fifty though children were the target audience, Harley's story lines were provocative in ways no other Batman tales had been.

Harley stories grappled very directly — albeit in exaggerated, cartoonish fashion — with cycles of domestic violence. In classic episodes like "The Laughing Fish," "Harley and Ivy," and "Harlequinade," Harley and the Joker map out a fascinating power dynamic. Similar all great superhero-fiction relationships, Joker and Harley's followed a template. At the showtime, Harley is head over heels for Joker, but he treats her similar dirt. And then they carve up, commonly because Joker kicks her out or Harley decides she's had enough. Harley strikes out on her ain or shacks up with fellow villainess Poison Ivy (Dini strongly implied that Harley and Ivy have a sexual human relationship, and this fact is more or less canon by now, though DC never officially confirms information technology). Harley fluctuates betwixt pining for Joker and blasphemous his name. Joker realizes something'due south missing from his life without his gal. And so some explosive turn of events reunites the murderous twosome. There were all kinds of variations, but the cadre outline became like a Punch and Judy show: cyclical, violent, and compellingly simple.

There are a pair of transcendent moments in the season-two episode "Harlequinade" that come up every bit shut every bit whatsoever to encapsulating the tragedy, one-act, and magic of the Harley-Joker romance. Harley, separated from the Joker later on an arrest (he's noticeably unconcerned with getting her out), agrees to help Batman on a caper in commutation for a total pardon. At a gangster hideout, she has to create a diversion to allow Robin to break into the building. When the atomic number 82 mobster says he doesn't sympathize why Harley sticks with the Joker, she leaps in front of the hideout's in-house band and begins to sing. It's an obscure novelty song from the 1940s, "Say That We're Sweethearts Again," filled with lyrics like, "I never knew that our romance had ended / until you poisoned my food" and "Won't yous delight put down that acid?" As Sorkin croons, it'south difficult to know whether yous should laugh or weep.

Harley holds anybody's attention with a vaudevillian flair. She's feminine just not objectified. She'southward in accuse of the entire room. And however, she yet misses her soul mate, no matter how awful he might exist to her.

Past episode's cease, the two are reunited, just in a way that could only happen to Joker and Harley. Joker tries to blow upwards Gotham and — to Harley'south shock — is willing to leave her behind as he flies abroad in a biplane. Harley, furious, shoots a jester-shaped toy at the cockpitted Joker, yelling, "Laugh this off, puddin'!" Joker crashes, and Harley saves the day (though she just did and so out of rage toward her scornful lover). She walks upwards to him, armed with a machine gun. E'er the emotional abuser, Joker taunts her: "Y'all don't have the guts. Not in a meg years would you— " Harley cuts him off by pulling the trigger, her eyes welling with tears. Merely a comical sign reading "RAT TAT TAT" is all that comes out of the barrel. Surprised, Harley gives a sheepish grin. Joker'southward scowl abruptly turns into a smiling.

"Babe, you're the greatest!" he shouts. This human action of violent defiance has rekindled his love. She squeals and runs into his arms. Even F. Scott and Zelda would blush. (It's too worth noting that their star-crossed romance was inter-indigenous: Harley was written as Jewish, oftentimes uttering yiddishkeit words like plotz. As Sorkin put information technology: "At least we know the Joker isn't an anti-Semite!")

Fans immediately responded to this strange, passionate woman. Tara Strand was about fifteen and living in the Podunk town of Victorville, California, when she first saw Harley on The Animated Series, and right away she "felt this big kinship with her."

"There weren't a lot of female characters at the fourth dimension like her who were and then human and unique and refreshing and weird, and not just sexy," she said. "Harley was the 1 person who can handle what the Joker can dish out. She's peradventure a piffling masochistic, merely the Joker needs somebody who can deal with the Joker, and Harley's information technology."

Strand, like countless other viewers effectually the earth, became Harley Quinn obsessives. She sought out fellow enthusiasts on the nascent World Wide Web and made friends as far away as Federal republic of germany and Australia. (It's hard to go a number demonstrating the latitude of '90s Harley fandom, but Sorkin, Dini, and Timm all recalled torrents of fan letters.) And for the most part, Strand'south Quinn-thusiast friends were women. Together, they compiled online indexes nearly Harley and composed long essays nearly what makes her tick. Building a woman-dominated superhero fandom in the mid '90s was a remarkable matter, and Harley had inspired them to exercise it.

"Feminism is about showing women as fully fleshed out human being beings, and that's what Harley is," Strand said. "She doesn't make choices that are smart or practiced for a adult female, but she gets to brand those choices. Men are allowed to be fuck-ups in all kinds of characters, and women aren't. We have to be idealized. She gets to not be."

DC had a hit on its hands different whatever it'd seen in a long time. Harley was the breakout star of Batman: The Animated Series, and the bear witness was a massive success, giving mode to spinoff and tie-in shows that would concluding until 2006. Harley was a character invented in a not-comics property with little fanfare and very few top-down editorial edicts. But now she was generating a tidal wave of fan response demanding more than of her. Toys were fabricated, more than episodes penned, and soon she was chosen up to the big leagues, where she had a meteoric ascent — followed by a depressing fall into irrelevance.

The game changer was a concise tale called "Mad Honey." Past 1994, Harley fever had caught on, and DC'south comics arm asked Dini and Timm to create a unmarried-issue comics story that would reveal Harley's origin story. We'd already gotten hints that Harley had once been Joker's psychiatrist, just in "Mad Honey" we fully saw her early days as mild-mannered Harleen Quinzel, gymnast and aspiring mental-health professional. Looking to write a pop-psychology book about the Joker, she falls for him and decides (of her own will) to become his sidekick.

"Mad Love" was a massive hit, winning an Eisner (the comics' world's Academy Award) for the year's best unmarried result and convincing DC that Harley was a marketable property. Soon Harley was a regular in The Batman Adventures, a comics series set in the universe of The Animated Series. And finally, afterward years of cartoonish popularity, DC made her a canonical character in the primary Batman comics continuity in 1999. Such continuity is treated with groovy intendance, and if a graphic symbol created outside of information technology is allowed to enter, information technology'southward no small creative achievement.

In the early aughts, Harley was everywhere. In 2001, she got her own monthly comics series, the eponymous Harley Quinn. The side by side twelvemonth she became a recurring graphic symbol on Tv's Birds of Prey, a loose adaptation of a comics series of the same name. She starred in a goofy spider web-only animated series called Gotham Girls, which aired equally minutes-long Macromedia Wink cartoons. She bounced and laughed her fashion across DC's diverse platforms.

The high times were not to last, though. In the mid aughts, things barbarous apart for Harley. Her solo comics series was something of a bomb and veered wildly between forgettable fluff, bad-mannered neo-noir, and larger-than-life nonsense. Information technology was canceled in 2003. Elsewhere in mainstream comics continuity, she was used just sporadically, rarely generating the kind of buzz on the page that she'd generated on-screen.

What went incorrect? Comics essayist and Batman historian Chris Sims offers a theory. "When you move her into mainstream continuity in 1999, information technology immediately changes things, because she'southward in love with the Joker nosotros have in the comics, not the one in the cartoon," he told me. "And comics Joker has killed a million people. He's a sadistic, torturing murderer. You can't empathize with her when that's the Joker she likes." On the other manus, if you motility her abroad from the Joker, y'all remove her defining relationship. It would be similar writing years' worth of Joker stories that didn't involve Batman: empty and disruptive.

So, out of nowhere, Harley'southward salvation came from far outside the pages of monthly comics. Information technology was a mixed blessing, equally that salvation as well set an extremely controversial new template for Harley Quinn, one that would pit fan against publisher every bit it rocketed the character to her greatest heights of fame to date.

Given her nascency outside of comics, it'south oddly plumbing fixtures that Harley's rebirth came in some other medium, besides: video games. In 2009, Rocksteady Studios released an action-risk trounce-'em-upward chosen Batman: Arkham Asylum, and although it was insanely gritty and violent, the creators took their principal inspiration from Batman: The Animated Serial. Dini wrote it; Kevin Conroy and Mark Hamill returned to voice Batman and the Joker; and most consequentially, Harley Quinn was a huge graphic symbol, voiced by Sorkin. Indeed, she's the only major female character visible for nigh of the game.

And that visibility is where the smashing Harley Quinn controversies of the by few years began. Gone was the iconic red-and-black one-piece, replaced by thigh-high boots, a red-and-purple corset that barely covers her breasts, and — given that the whole game took place within an asylum — some scraps of white doctor's robes, stained with claret. Her face was nevertheless painted, but her jester'due south cap was replaced by two massive, blonde pigtails. It was, to put it mildly, a very different visual approach to the character.

"There was a huge outcry for a lot of people who really similar Harley Quinn," recalled famed pseudonymous comics announcer "Sue" of the site DC Women Kicking Donkey. "It was clearly a little bit of pandering. Does information technology fit Harley? I don't know. The Harley Quinn character has always totally run out of fucks to give, then would she listen wearing that? I don't know."

Dini and Timm are divided on their feelings about Arkham's Harley. Dini, as the game's writer, was very much in favor of the new direction, telling gaming site the Reticule, "I had a large amount of input into the way the characters were depicted, I wanted to make them darker … I wanted to get in clear that Harley Quinn was out of her mind." Timm, on the other hand, seems far more agnostic: "In that location must be something to it, because that is, right now, the near popular version of her, I judge," he told me. "I don't own the grapheme, and so whatever DC wants to do with information technology is fine with me."

Throughout the game, Harley assists the Joker in his plot to destroy Batman within the confines of Arkham. She regularly issues classic Dini-esque lines to Batman on her lover's behalf. Other than her wait, the biggest change nosotros see is how much more than grim Joker's verbal abuse of her is. Information technology'south particularly chilling to hear him deliver this line of dialogue to Batman: "You lot had to spoil everything: beating up Bane, feeding Scarecrow to Croc, slapping around Harley — my hobby, by the way."

Arkham Aviary was a gargantuan hitting. Video games are a massively more than influential medium than comics these days (for context: Arkham Aviary sold 2.5 million units within just a few weeks of its debut; the biggest-selling Batman comic of that same month simply sold 106,835 copies). Since Harley hadn't been in whatsoever Batman feature films, Arkham Asylum was the single most influential depiction of the character since her Animated Series heyday.

A sequel called Arkham City hit shelves in 2011, and although Harley had her original cherry-red-and-black color palette back, the costume was yet more dominatrix than clown. She also, for the first time, was no longer voiced past Sorkin, who was replaced by Tara Strong, a longtime DC vocalisation role player who had worked alongside Sorkin for years while doing other voices on DC's cartoons. (Neither Rocksteady nor Sorkin offered much detail to me about the decision, just saying the visitor wanted to milk shake things upwards and motility in a slightly different management.)

But the games were just the prelude to an fifty-fifty bigger outcry from fans and critics. The real bone of contention came out of the comics. In 2011, DC kicked off a visitor-broad relaunch of their comics, rebooting their entire universe and giving many characters a consummate makeover. Harley was 1 such graphic symbol. She became 1 of the stars of Suicide Squad, a series near super-criminals hired by the government to continue high-risk black-ops missions. Before the beginning issue fifty-fifty came out, information technology caused a furor among longtime fans. The cover prominently featured Harley, hips cocked, pilus dyed, and wearing an even more than revealing corset than the i she'd worn in Arkham Aviary.

"It's that archetype idea of 'show united states every bit much skin as possible because information technology'll bring in those teenage boys,'" said Laura Hornack, a Harley Quinn superfan from Deutschland. She launched an online campaign attacking the visual alter and fifty-fifty went so far equally to organize a protest at 2011'southward San Diego Comic-Con. Turnout wasn't bang-up, but she wasn't alone in her skepticism about the grapheme's direction.

In Suicide Squad, Harley was a somewhat different animal from her archetype depiction. She was notwithstanding in dear with the Joker, just idea he'd been killed, so we mostly saw her palling around with her fellow Squad members — even hooking up with stoic assassin Deadshot. She was more of a psychopath than usual, grinning every bit she executed encarmine murders and giggling in situations where fifty-fifty her hardened teammates were terrified. The volume was, for the most part, critically panned and canceled after thirty bug. She remained massively pop in the continuing installments of the Arkham video-game series (she even got her own spinoff game, Harley Quinn's Revenge, in 2012), only her comics persona was in crisis.

In 2013, DC wisely tried to turn a new foliage with Harley. The company announced it'd exist launching a new solo Harley Quinn series and hired acclaimed husband-and-wife duo Amanda Conner and Jimmy Palmiotti to write it. The series got off to a rocky commencement because of a poorly worded contest and subsequent bout of bad press for the first issue. But to DC's relief, futurity problems have drawn no such ire. In fact, the series has taken a cute and experimental new management for the character, different whatever she's ever had. Conner and Palmiotti have had Harley strike out on her own later on a rejection from the Joker, and she's moved to a place well known for housing over-the-top eccentrics: Coney Isle (New York City does, indeed, exist in the DC universe, although information technology's not every bit major a city equally City or Gotham).

In that location, she channels her aggression into roller-derby competitions, gets a day job every bit a therapist, and assembles a diverse cast of weirdos and outcasts around her. She's still pretty bonkers, simply she doesn't expect or human action similar a fetish fantasy anymore. She's coming into her own, and the writers try to aqueduct what made her neat into slightly more than good for you outlets.

The formula is working, at to the lowest degree financially: Harley Quinn is consistently one of DC's top-selling comics. The character's popularity is also soaring in other mediums, most notably with her upcoming big-screen debut in 2016's Suicide Squad moving picture, where she'll be played past Margot Robbie. She's still a major figure in the Batman world's most lucrative products, the Arkham video games, also every bit DC Amusement's extremely popular Injustice video-game series. Though she may have evolved substantially since that fateful cameo in "Joker'due south Favor," Harley has never been more successful, and her star shows no signs of falling.

And although in that location are longtime diehards like Strand and Hornack who have abandoned DC's electric current iterations of Harley, they should know they accept ideological allies in her current comics stewards, Palmiotti and Conner. The writing team considers Harley a feminist graphic symbol, drawing comparisons — and contrasts — betwixt her and comics' longest-standing female person icon, Wonder Adult female. "Wonder Woman sort of represents perfection, whereas Harley represents everybody else," Conner said.

One of the biggest Harley fans I've encountered is an Australian named Elise Archer, who's been a fan since the early days and says her fixation on Harley has helped her through her own battles with PTSD and clinical low. She was determined that Harley was ane of the near of import feminist figures in superhero fiction — not in spite of her shortcomings, only considering of them.

"I don't want to exist condescended to with strong, contained female characters who don't take whatever flaws and are just kinda perfect and sane and never brand bad relationship choices," she said. "For me, the liberty Harley's been given to exist a fuck-up is much less misogynist than all these other hackneyed stories thrust on female person characters once again and again."

"If you lot want to make the argument that we've gotta teach people how to be good and salubrious, do it with the fuckin' heroes," Archer said, her voice quivering with emotion. "Let the villains be the messy ones."

The Foreign, Hidden Story of Harley Quinn