Introduction: Harley Quinn: Is she a feminist icon? A competent psychiatrist fallen tragic victim to severe mental illness? Villain(ess) extraordinaire? The Joker’s girlfriend? Queer hero?
Or does she, throughout her myriad iterations, rather claim a small piece of all of those identities, exhibiting the nuanced liminality that is the practiced territory of characters so complex, so enduring, and so popular that they transcend their own medium and permeate into more mainstream pop cultural consciousness?
In this class, students are encouraged to follow this fascinating character from her origins as a sexy sidekick to her breakthrough into blockbuster cinema and beyond. Using a feminist lens, we will undertake an intense character analysis of Harley Quinn and trace her manifestations across multiple media.
Week 1: Graphic Histories: A Brief History of Comic Books and Their Adaptations
- DC Comics: A Visual History, by Daniel Wallace
- Encyclopedia of Comic Books and Graphic Novels, Edited by M. Keith Booker
- The DC Comics Encyclopedia, by Michael Teitelbaum
- These three books will be used in tandem with one another throughout the entire semester. They provide valuable visual and historical resources into the history of comic book art and storyline as a cohesive entity, and the books focused on the DC Universes are helpfully specific in their scope. These books — particularly the first title — are also tools to help the reader situate the birth of certain comics and comic styles in their appropriate sociocultural time and place, as the advent of certain comics, characters, and rhetorical/visual styles are directly linked with major global events and shifting societal attitudes towards geopolitics and national security.
- Arresting Development: Comics at the Boundaries of Literature, by Christopher Pizzino; Chapters: Introduction (“From the Basement”) & Conclusion (“On Becoming a Comics Scholar”)
- This book in its entirety is a relevant scholarly examination and critique of graphic novelists and the way their medium — a relatively young storytelling medium that is still fighting for academic and artistic legitimacy — falls victim to certain tropes that serve only to perpetuate its perception as an unsophisticated or juvenile vehicle for frivolous entertainment.
- St. James Encyclopedia of Popular Culture, Edited by Thomas Riggs
- With this work, I would like to provide students with a broader means of contextualizing graphic novels and related media of the past and present in such a way as to map their vicissitudes in style, content, and overall popularity against other popular works of art, literature, and means of storytelling across the decades. As with the first three titles of this first week, though certain entries will be specifically emphasized on certain weeks, students are also encouraged to look at relevant passages and definitions that will inform their understanding of the current week’s topics. In the case of this title in particular, students will be encouraged to look at the largest/most thorough entries that coincide with one another’s dates (approximately ten years before or after) so as so glean a general timeline of the ascent, descent, and resurgence of artistic and cultural movements over time.
Week 2: Sexy Supers & Femme Fatales: A Brief Foray into Feminism and Female Representation in Comics and Their Adaptations
- The Supergirls : Fashion, Feminism, Fantasy, and the History of Comic Book Heroines by Mike Madrid; Chapters: “Goddesses of Tomorrow,” “Sex and the Single Superheroine,” “Heroine Chic”
- This title provides students with a useful introduction to the history of female characters (almost exclusively superheroes, unfortunately). In Mike Madrid’s respectful, but appropriately critical history of the myriad and ever-evolving ways women have been depicted in graphic novels, we will pay particular attention to the chapters that are most relevant to our purposes: In “Goddesses of Tomorrow,” Madrid lays out the broader critical foundation upon which he will layer his nuanced history. In “Sex and the Single Superheroine,” Madrid examines how the movement(s) encouraging female liberation and sexual openness have affected the way unattached female superheroes have been portrayed over the years. (This chapter also contains the only brief mention of Harley Quinn.)
- Three articles take on feminism in the comic-book-movie industry:
- http://everydayfeminism.com/2013/11/female-characters-superhero-films/
- http://nypost.com/2015/05/07/marvel-and-its-sexist-superhero-movies-hit-a-new-low/
- http://www.timeout.com/london/film/bam-how-female-superheroes-are-taking-over-the-movies
- In these three short articles, we see various authors over the past three years take contradictory positions on the pervasiveness of feminism in the comic-book-movie industry. Students are encouraged to examine these pieces that at first glance seem to be at odds with one another for arguments in which they do, in fact, overlap. Also, students are encouraged to analyze the dialogue itself, making not of how discussions of feminism have evolved with new movies, new characters, new stories, and new means of engaging with all of these.
Week 3: “If I Have a Past, then I Prefer it to Be Multiple Choice:” A Brief History of Batman + the Joker
- The Joker: A Visual History of the Clown Prince of Crime, by Daniel Wallace
- As with the encyclopedias and visual histories used throughout the first week of the syllabus, this book will allow students an easily digestible introduction into Batman’s most infamous archenemy. Furthermore, as how characters are visually represented on page and screen are so crucial to their interpretation across various communities, it is important to make note of the shifting visual conceits and the ways in which certain physical characteristics of the Joker have changed over time. Students are asked to make note of this complex metamorphosis and continuously use these notes to undertake a similar analysis of the stylistic evolution of Harley Quinn, as unfortunately no such visual history/encyclopedia exists for her.
- Arrested Development, Chapter 3 (“Pop Art Comics: Frank Miller”)
- In this week, we revisit Christopher Pizzino’s work, instead focusing on Chapter 3: his analysis of the graphic novels and storylines of Frank Miller. While acknowledging his genius and registering his respect for the famed graphic novelist, Pizzino specifically emphasizes the uncomfortable dissonance in Miller’s stated objectives in creating a new breed of comics with the often hackneyed or exploitative final products. Pizzino argues that, though Miller indeed made a profound impact on the medium and recognizes Miller’s arguably unparalleled contributions to the noir era of comics, Miller did not distance himself quite far enough from the cliched, mindlessly-violent and sexual works that immediately preceded or accompanied him.
- The Joker: A Serious Study of the Clown Prince of Crime, Edited by Robert Moses; Chapters: “Episodes of Madness”, “You Complete Me”
- In this collection of academic works on the Joker, students are taken encouraged to probe deeper into the DC Universe as it intersects with our present reality and begin to conceptualize the Batman v. Joker, good v. evil dichotomies as continuums along which notions of morality, responsibility, and authority occupy complex, often untenable positions. Both of these chapters serve as part introduction to the Joker as represented in graphic novels, film, and television, part interrogation of the very principles that ostensibly characterize each figure and underscore their protracted interactions over the long narrative arcs of comic books and related media.
Week 4: Enter Harley Quinn, the Clown Princess of Crime
- Watch Batman: The Animated Series (1992), Season 1 Episode 22 (“Joker’s Favor”) & Season 4 Episode 21 (“Mad Love”)
- These serve as the world’s introduction to the character of Harley Quinn; the first episode listed is from the 1992 series in which she makes her first ever appearance anywhere, while the second episode listed delves deeper into her backstory, revealing the origins of her relationship with the Joker and Batman. While perhaps not the most worthwhile episodes of which to undertake a lengthy critical analysis (as there have been several episodes of other television shows, movies, and graphic novels that have since more fully developed Harley’s psychobiography are are widely understood to be the more definitive references), these episodes are nonetheless important to watch as the foundation upon which this highly variable character has manifested over the years.
- “Harley’s Haven” (www.harley-quinn.com)
- Students are encouraged to freely explore this delightful website, ideally devoting at least 30 minutes to clicking the various sections and exploring a fan’s account of Harley Quinn’s past and present both within the realm of certain franchises as well as her position as an object of fascination and curiosity in contemporary culture. This website — over a decade old, and created by a self-described Harley devotee — will also serve as a somewhat primitive, but still wholly relevant precursor to the fan-created online communities that we will explore in greater detail in Week 8.
- The Joker: A Serious Study of the Clown Prince of Crime, Chapter: “Kiss with a Fist”
- We return to last week’s scholarly anthology on the Joker, instead turning our attention to one of the only academic works ever written on Harley Quinn. (It is telling that, as one of the only such articles focused on Harley, it is nevertheless linking her inextricably to the Joker.) In this chapter, Tosha Taylor interrogates the “gendered power struggle” of the villainous couple, utilizing common feminist critiques of rape/domestic violence culture to place their relationship in the larger context of misogyny, female agency, and female representation in the comic community.
- Batman: Harley Quinn and The Batman Adventures: Mad Love
- Batman: The Animated Series creator Paul Dini also contributed to these two seminal, award-winning graphic novels on the “clown princess of crime.” These are the kinds of works to which the syllabus alluded earlier: comics that serve as the true accounts of Harley’s origins, detailing her professional psychiatric career, its subsequent derailment by her increasingly-severe schizophrenic symptoms, and the development of her romantic relationship with the Joker.
A look ahead:
Week 5: Pathology on the Page: Representations of Mental Illness in Comic Books
Week 6: The Princess and her Puddin’: Harley Quinn’s Relationship with the Joker
Week 7: “Crypto-Queer” in Comics: Harley Quinn’s Relationship with Poison Ivy/Queer Representation in Comic Books and Their Adaptations
Week 8: The Princess’s Subjects: Fan Communities and Harley Quinn
