You smell like the best donut ever.
Creative Staff:
Story: Jimmy Palmiotti, Amanda Conner
Art: Chad Hardin
What They Say:
It’s Valentine’s Day, and Harley is getting depressed watching happy couples walk by. Will a special gift from Poison Ivy turn things around for Harley?
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
With Harley having settled into her place pretty well and now having dealt with a few more assassins coming her way, it’s no surprise that it’s not going to stop. Amusingly enough, it’s more of a background nuisance to her at this point, to the level where she’s even stopped counting how many there are because it’s just too depressing. How can a girl go through a scary roller coaster ride and enjoy it knowing that at the end there’s bound to be somebody trying to off her? It’s cute and silly with the structure used to present it in the first few pages and that sets the light tone well, but also the mayhem for what’s to come next.
Valentine’s Day.
Suffice to say, it’s not a day Harley is keen on since her puddin’ isn’t around at the moment, so she’s just feeling more depressed about things. Even a little bit more so when returning home and finding Tony there with flowers, only to find out they’re actually for Queenie, who herself has opted to go out with a sanitation department guy. For Harley, she ends up going through the self pitying routine just a bit before getting herself back on track by getting all dolled up to get a drink after getting good news about her application for the therapist job. To celebrate, what better thing to do than to get dressed in familiar colors in a different style of outfit, head to the bar and have lots of guys buy her drinks? Well, the un-harmful thing to do is to eat a couple of the berries off the potted plant Ivy left for her. At least she thinks so, since she doesn’t know that the berries are huge aphrodisiacs.
The Valentine’s horror/comedy that ensues works beautifully as she ends up causing a corrections bus to crash near her, and that unleashes a small horde of criminals that are now all smitten with her in a big way and will maim and kill to get at her. No matter where she goes, more are drawn into it and she’s not above using people to put some distance between her and everyone else. There’s a great series of action sequences through a big box hardware store that lets her shine, and some amusing material involving a female police officer that follows it, but mostly we just get a lot of action and humor playing along here as her evening out to celebrate just goes worse and worse – yet gives her almost exactly what she really needed.
In Summary:
Holiday themed issues really aren’t my thing since they tend to be time wasters that either force the main story into it or it just ejects the main story overall. Here, since there really isn’t a main story outside of just watching Harley’s life with a few assassination attempts to string things together for the moment, it’s not as big of an issue and what we get is just seeing how she’s coping without having that someone special in her life. There’s some great dialogue between her and her stuffed beaver that’s worth the price of admission alone and the action aspect is really well handled to make it fun and over the top. Similarly, I really liked the structure of the first few pages to tell the story with its layouts and black space. Overall, it’s definitely not the best thing to do to have a holiday themed issue at issue three, bu the team here plays it right and keeps it light but still very much what the book is all about.
Grade: B
Age Rating: 16+
Released By: DC Comics via ComiXology
Release Date: February 19th, 2014
MSRP: $2.99
