Harley Quinn: This Year's Comic Book 'It' Girl

Harley Quinn brings her unique brand of bonkers to cinemas this summer. In preparation, Joseph McCabe has a therapy session with her creators...

- Joseph McCabe

Although superheroes dominate the big screen these days, few such box-office champions were created in the last three decades. For every Deadpool there are 20 of Marvel’s Avengers, most of whom you can trace at least as far back as the 1970s. And when you take DC’s film output into account, there are even fewer newcomers. One child of the ’90s, however, has seen her fame rise as high as that of Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman. DC co-publisher Jim Lee calls her “the fourth pillar.” And yet if you were to inform Harley Quinn of just how popular she is, she’d most likely laugh in your face... before popping her bubblegum in it.

Most fans who grew up with Harley know that she started conquering contemporary pop culture with her first appearance on 1992’s Batman: The Animated Series, in the show’s first-season episode “Joker’s Favor”. At first she was merely an irreverent sidekick to the Clown Prince of Crime, garbed in greasepaint and a red-and-black harlequin costume – but viewers were captivated by her from the moment she opened her mouth, out of which emerged a New York accent as tart as tabasco sauce and as nutty as a fruitcake. But just how did Harley enter the world? Where did she come from?

“Well,” says her creator, Batman Animated producer Paul Dini, when he sits down to lunch with Comic Heroes, “rocketed to Earth from the doomed planet Harletron...”