Today, all round media devotee Clare explains how she got hooked on Harley Quinn and why you should too.
Harley Quinn got me into comics.
Like every geek in the late nineties and early aughts, I had consumed a metric ton of anime and manga (
Yu-Gi-Oh!, anyone?), but, unlike every geek in the late nineties and early aughts, my only experience with Western comics was with my brother’s lovingly curated
Asterix collection. A collection which I had vandalized as a small child and was thus banned from touching. After my brother went off to college and my father and I began raiding his possessions, I finally came across his Big Two books:
Marvels, Kingdom Come, and, most importantly, Les Daniels’
Marvel.
Daniels’ extremely biased account of the rise of Marvel gave me a quiet hankering for good old-fashioned superhero comics, although my fond childhood memories of
Batman: The Animated Series and
The Adventures of Lois and Clark steered me towards DC. I investigated the 1998-2003
Young Justice and liked what I saw (namely, nineties Superboy, who is my forever Superboy), but I could never quite get into it. Casting around for something else, I stumbled across the 2001 to 2003
Harley Quinn and devoured it in one of my teenage self-soothing media binges.
So when the first issue of
The Unwritten finally lured me into a comic book store in 2009 (it was a dollar!), it made perfect sense to supplement that purchase with
Gotham City Sirens, which started around the same time. I still give people that advice when they want to break into comics: find a character you like and just focus on them for a while to get your feet wet. Those two comics were the first in my now small but sizable comic collection, and
Gotham City Sirens was the first comic I ever owned in its entirety in single issues. They’re special to me.
But reading
Gotham City Sirens made me realize how lucky I was to start reading Harley Quinn comics with, well,
Harley Quinn.
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