The thing that I love about the Harleen mini-series was the way he re-imagined her origin story. There’s clearly a vast amount of respect for the source material: ie: Her og origin story as it was presented in Batman: The Animated Series (the comic one shot, tho it was adapted for the series, too).Like yes, me made some changes. Her motivation for working at Arkham and wanting to analyze Joker, and her college affair with a professor, not to mention the addition of her meeting Joker on the street and witnessing a fight between him and Batman and the fall of Harvey Dent as a subplot coinciding with her breakdown.

It not only adds nuance to the more...duplicitous nature of Harleen but it does so without turning her into a well-meaning psychiatrist driven mad by the hubris of trying to understand the Joker. The two modern trends I’ve seen when it comes to recontextualizing Harley’s origin story in a time where “problematic” and “toxic” is (overused) in media analysis is to make Harley a total victim or to just quickly handwave it away. Stjepan did neither of these things, but instead turned the origin story on its head.

For example, that affair with her professor. It’s referred to as a fling that tainted her reputation. For those of you who don’t know, because you know, I’m not going to expect everyone to have watched B:TAS (or read that old comic) because it’s only recently been easy to stream, in her origin story episode, Harley is shown as someone who wasn’t especially interested in working hard for her grades and instead flirted (or slept with) her professors in exchange for passing marks. (Side note: Incredible that B:TAS was considered a kid’s show but it had a lot of implicit references that were pretty adult.) There’s a subtle grace to the way that script got flipped. Harley still has that nasty reputation when it reality. she just ended up making a very poor decision.

Harleen is soaked in a thousand little reasons she broke, not just the traditional “she fell in love with Joker” narrative. She’s been emotionally isolated since college and doesn’t have a lot of people close to her (ie: no real support system), shortly after the traumatic first encounter with Joker she’s clearly suffering from symptoms of PTSD. She has horrible nightmares, has trouble sleeping, has daily conversations with Arkham’s inmates including Joker, who acts increasingly familiar with her as time goes on, all against the backdrop of Harvey Dent’s transformation into Two Face and a violent vigilante group taking crime into their own hands. 

She’s working on proving a hypothesis that living in Gotham is like living in a warzone and the barrage of violence and fear erodes at the empathy in the minds of its citizens, which exacerbates the criminality in the city. The tragic irony of Harleen is no longer that she’s a “therapist that fell in love with the Joker”, the irony becomes that she exemplifies the end point of her hypothesis.

Ugh, it’s so good.

I will briefly touch on the Jarley content at the core of the story, and yeah, it’s romantic. Although it’s broadly implied that Joker got a file on Harley to study in order to manipulate her and used her growing empathy/lust for him against her, Stjepan seems to lean in that Joker loves Harley in his own way. Much as I’m not a fan of Jarley, I don’t mind this. An abuser doesn’t come right out with the terrorizing. Even in Mad Love, even in SuSquad 2016 it portrays Joker as winning her over with expressions of softness. So yeah, it doesn’t bother me that Stjepan isn’t coming out the gate portraying his abject cruelty to her. She’s the anomaly, the one he spared on a whim. Sucks to say in this case, but what drives a romance is being able to show how and why a couple might want to be together. Stjepan did a very good job writing the relationship, sorry, but I stand by my assertion that it wasn’t romanticized. Thankfully, he appears to endgame Harlivy, which perhaps makes it a bit more palatable.

tl;dr: It’s three issues. Please read Harleen. It’s so good.