Harley Quinn #18 Review

Harley Quinn #18 gives the reader 2 different stories in one issue. The first story starts off in the future. Dehani Kage is being sent to the past to help fight villains. She steps into a machine, dressed in a Batman suit. In the present, Harley is being beaten up by three people and they are kidnapping her. These thugs were sent in to “help” with the problem, the mayor is cracking down on the homeless and he instructed his assistant to handle the problem. His assistant hired cannibals and they eat all the undesirables. Yes, cannibals.

The second story is a robbery in progress by Joker and Harley. They steal some jewels, money and a fur coat. Joker thinks they will not get caught, but watching the news, they see they made a mistake in leaving Harley’s coat at the scene and that is all the dark knight needs to pursue them. There was a nice memoriam to artist Bernie Wrightson at the end, three pages in black in white.

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Harley Quinn #18 had a lot to put in a 23 paged issue book. This makes makes the book very disjointed to read. I would have personally liked to have read a little more about Dehani Kage and the cannibal gang. I loved that Harley was hard to keep down, she fought off two strong arms after she was drugged. It was pretty funny to read, albeit bloody. Red Tool and Eggy are only end a few frames, they seem to have that big of an impact until the end of this story. The Joker and Harley story was just unnecessary. It felt that it was a filler story to make the book bigger. The writing was good, intriguing until it was cut short, Palmiotti and Conner do a good job.
The colors and art in the first story are wonderful/ It is roughly drawn, which captures the atmosphere of the character and storyline. Timms does a good job taking the story and styling the art around it. The second story, to me, looked like it was drawn in contrast to the 1990s Batman cartoon. Blevins is good and Bone’s inking is heavy, but crisp, plays with the story.