Harley Quinn

• 1. Introduction

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  Harley Quinn, the DC Comics character, first appeared on screen on the 11th of September 1992, in the 22nd episode of Batman: The Animated Series. The episode was called Joker's Favor, and she was supposed to appear in it once and never return. Writer Paul Dini and artist Bruce Timm created her as a henchwoman for the Joker, a small comic role in a dark story. Today DC Comics publisher Jim Lee calls her the fourth pillar of the company's publishing line, after Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman. Where did she come from, and who gave her that voice? Why did some of the people who made the show resist bringing her back? And what happens to a sidekick when she stops wanting to be one?

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• 2. Cake and Greasepaint

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  A cake was the first problem. Dini found the story he was writing grim, so he wanted henchpeople around the Joker to supply comic relief. He needed someone to burst out of a cake, and the Joker doing it himself seemed too strange. The crew invented a female sidekick for the surprise. In the finished episode the Joker ended up inside the cake anyway, and the new character stayed.

  Dini soon saw a bigger job for her. He wanted a foil who would sharpen the Joker's best-known traits: funny, scary, and egotistical. He took inspiration from the molls of the 1960s live-action Batman series and other television shows, and he imagined a Punch and Judy attitude between the pair. In his words, "she could crack a joke and the henchmen would laugh, and the Joker would kind of glare at her."

  The name took some searching. Dini considered several options, including Columbine, before settling on Harley Quinn. Other Batman characters carried punning names, and he thought Harley was a fun name for a girl. The pun is on Harlequin, a stock character from commedia dell'arte, the sixteenth-century Italian physical comedy theater.

  Timm handled the look. He made a simplified supervillain version of the traditional Harlequin costume, keeping the jester hat, ruffled collar, diamond pattern, and domino mask. All of it went onto a red-and-black bodysuit, with the diamonds placed to make animation easier. The red and black came from the Golden Age comic book character Daredevil. Dini had drawn a rough design first, and Timm improved on it.

  The costume was borrowed, but the personality was borrowed too, from a friend of Dini's.

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• 3. Arleen Sorkin

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  In 1991, Dini sat watching an episode of Days of Our Lives in which his college friend Arleen Sorkin played a jester. The idea for Harley Quinn dates from that viewing. Dini built the character on Sorkin, taking her mannerisms and her snappy, wisecracking, bubbly blonde personality. Then he cast her as the voice.

  Sorkin used her own New York accent and added a little Yiddish sound. Dini had made the character Jewish, another trait lifted from the actress. He described the voice as a snappy blonde with a bit of a bad girl in it. He heard a little of Adelaide from Guys and Dolls, a little of Judy Holliday, and a lot of Arleen.

  The borrowing reached the name on the page. A later comic gave the character's full name as Harleen Frances Quinzel. Harleen Frances echoed Sorkin's first and middle names, Arleen Frances. Quinzel came from an Emerson College instructor of Dini's, whose surname was Quenzel.

  Mark Hamill, who voiced the Joker, credits Sorkin for the character's success. He wrote on Twitter that the script offered only an unnamed Joker "hench-wench" with no discernible personality. When Sorkin began reading the lines, he nearly fell off his chair, and in his phrase, "a legend was born."

  Not everyone behind the camera was ready to see her again, though.

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• 4. Walk-On to Regular

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  Producer Alan Burnett had doubts. He and Timm worried that giving the Joker a girlfriend played toward his comedic side and would humanize him too much. They wanted a Joker who was as serious a threat to Batman as possible. Dini, impressed by the rough cut, pushed to bring her back.

  Months later she returned. In The Laughing Fish she became the Joker's love interest, and she also appeared in Almost Got 'Im. Those two aired in the reverse of their production order. Between them by production sits Joker's Wild, set in a casino where waiters are dressed as Harley and her photograph sits in a file.

  Viewers took to her. She earned starring episodes of her own, including 1994's Harlequinade and Harley's Holiday, which explored her life without the Joker. She became a recurring character across the DC Animated Universe. Her credits there include The New Batman Adventures, the film Batman Beyond: Return of the Joker, and non-Batman shows such as Superman: The Animated Series, Static Shock, and Justice League. A 31-episode web series called Gotham Girls teamed her with Poison Ivy and Catwoman.

  In February 1994 she reached video games in The Adventures of Batman and Robin, an action platformer based on the series. Her darkest animated turn came in Return of the Joker, where flashbacks show her helping the Joker kidnap Tim Drake and torture him into insanity, so he can become their son, J.J. She survives that film and is revealed at the end as a reformed grandmother, called Nana Harley by the Dee Dee Twins.

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• 5. Mad Love

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  In September 1993, a year after her debut, Harley Quinn stepped into print. She appeared in the 12th issue of The Batman Adventures, a comic set in the animated universe, and became a regular there. In 1997 she turned up as a schoolgirl named Hayley Fitzpatrick in Batman: Thrillkiller, an out-of-continuity story published under DC's Elseworlds imprint.

  The story that defined her arrived in February 1994. The Batman Adventures: Mad Love was a one-shot written by Dini and drawn by Timm, and it was their first comic book collaboration. It presents Harleen Quinzel as a psychologist who fell in love with the Joker during an internship at Arkham Asylum in Gotham City. It follows her transformation into his accomplice, and it shows how little respect he has for her.

  Dini gave her motives and made her a tragic, sympathetic figure. Many consider Mad Love the definitive Harley Quinn story. It won both the Eisner and Harvey awards for Best Single Issue in the same year. It was adapted in 1999 as an episode of The New Batman Adventures.

  That same year she crossed into the mainstream DC Universe with the one-shot graphic novel Batman: Harley Quinn, written by Dini and illustrated by Yvel Guichet. Its story placed her origin in the middle of the No Man's Land storyline. Her immunity to toxins and enhanced strength and agility, which a formula from Poison Ivy had given her, came along from the cartoon. Dini said these would give her a "physical edge" over Batman and other heroes.

  Dini also made one other change for the comics, and it concerned the Joker.

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• 6. Mistah J and Red

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  Harley calls him "Mistah J" and "Puddin'." Their bond, first set out in Mad Love, is intensely codependent. The Joker habitually leaves her behind when danger comes, and she always returns to him. When she defeats Batman in that story, the Joker feels emasculated by his own failure. Fearing what other villains will think, he injures her badly. While she recovers, he sends flowers, and she accepts them.

  Dini describes the relationship as emotionally abusive. He sympathizes with Harley's sense of abandonment and says he based most of her dialogue on his own past experiences. Some analysts read the Joker's control as a way of reinforcing his belief in his own power, in a world where Batman or another villain might neutralize him. In the 1999 one-shot, he admits he cares for her and that the feelings are romantic. He then decides to kill her, because those feelings keep him from his purpose.

  The other great relationship began with a different Dini idea. He wanted a story in which Harley grows stronger and leaves the Joker. He paired her with Poison Ivy, whom he called the strongest contrast to Harley. Ivy debuted as her friend in the 1993 episode Harley and Ivy. Dini said he could see romance between them the more he wrote them, but a children's cartoon of that time could not portray it.

  In comics, their partnership rests on real friendship and mutual respect. Ivy wants to rescue Harley from the Joker and despises him. In the last storyline of Gotham City Sirens, Harley suggests Ivy might love her, and Ivy later admits she may. Writers Amanda Conner and Jimmy Palmiotti hinted at romance in their New 52 series. Asked on Twitter, they answered: "Yes, they are girlfriends without the jealousy of monogamy." Harley Quinn #25 in 2017 marked their first canonical kiss.

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• 7. Reinventions

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  In December 2000, writer Karl Kesel and artist Terry Dodson launched Harley's first ongoing series. Kesel had read Mad Love and become a fan, and the pair spent a month on a proposal about "love gone horribly, terribly wrong." Rachel Dodson, Terry's wife, joined to ink. The run followed Harley leaving the Joker to become a solo criminal, backed by henchmen called the Quinntets. Sales disappointed, and Kesel's 25 issues ended in December 2002. A grittier team led by writer A.J. Lieberman followed, but sales stayed lackluster and the series was cancelled in 2003.

  In July 2009 Dini revived her in Gotham City Sirens, an unstable alliance with Catwoman and Poison Ivy. Issue #7 gave Harley a hometown in Brooklyn and a dysfunctional family, including a swindler father and a brother named Barry. The series ended in August 2011, when DC relaunched its entire line as The New 52.

  The New 52 remade her. In September 2011, writer Adam Glass made her a member of Task Force X in a relaunched Suicide Squad. Drawing on her look in the Batman: Arkham video games, the redesign gave her red and blue colors, bleached skin, and half-blue, half-red hair. She was more violent, and her origin was rewritten so the Joker pushes her into a vat of chemicals against her will. Fans disliked it because it removed her choice. The cover of the first issue drew controversy over its sexual depiction of her, and Glass received hate mail and threats.

  In September 2013, DC announced an art contest asking entrants to draw Harley in suicide scenarios, one involving her in a bathtub. The American Foundation for Suicide Prevention and other groups criticized it. DC apologized, and the final version replaced the bathtub scene with Harley sitting on a rocket flying through space.

  Palmiotti and Conner offered a very different Harley. Their series began in November 2013 with Harley Quinn #0, which gathered 17 artists, including Timm. It set her in Coney Island as a landlord to a cast of sideshow freaks, in a roller derby-inspired costume designed by Conner. Many consider them the most defining writers on the character since Dini and Timm. The series was among DC's top sellers.

  In 2017, Dini and Palmiotti wrote Harley Loves Joker, a nine-issue backup feature drawn by Bret Blevins. It put Harley on equal footing with the Joker, no longer a doormat, and tied her modern costume to her leaving him. In DC's 2021 relaunch, Infinite Frontier, writer Stephanie Phillips moved her back to Gotham City as a superheroine trying to make up for her past. By January 2022, Phillips confirmed that Harley would be a psychologist again.

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• 8. Mallet, Hyenas, and Fame

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  A gymnastics scholarship to Gotham State University is part of her background. Harley fights with clown-themed gag weapons, including pop guns, rubber chickens, and a gun that fires a boxing glove. Her signature weapon is an oversized mallet. She has also reverse-engineered the Joker's signature poison, Joker Venom, and developed an antitoxin. She is the only person besides him known to make it.

  Her pet spotted hyenas, Bud and Lou, are named for the comedy duo Bud Abbott and Lou Costello. They debuted with her in the animated series. A later story set her as an animal research intern at S.T.A.R. Labs, where she met them. In the 2020 film Birds of Prey, her hyena is instead named Bruce, after Bruce Wayne.

  The 2016 relaunch of her comic shipped more copies than any other DC Rebirth title. That year, her Halloween costume ranked as the most popular in both the United States and the United Kingdom. DC declared February Harley Quinn Month and published 22 variant covers. Kevin Kiniry of DC Collectibles says she can go "toe-to-toe with Batman and the Joker" as one of the most fan-requested characters.

  On screen, Margot Robbie played her in Suicide Squad in 2016, Birds of Prey in 2020, and The Suicide Squad in 2021. Dini said Robbie "nailed" the role. Of the shopping cart full of Peeps in Birds of Prey, he said: "That's my girl." Lady Gaga plays Harleen "Lee" Quinzel in Joker: Folie à Deux in 2024. Director Todd Phillips called this version more grounded, ignoring her classic style. In animation, Kaley Cuoco voices her in the series Harley Quinn, and Jamie Chung voices a version in Batman: Caped Crusader who has no connection to the Joker.

  In June 2019, DC Collectibles began taking orders for a life-size, 5-foot-6-inch fiberglass resin statue of her. It was priced at $5,499.99.

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