She has this grand idea and great intentions but, in this case, the old saying is that the road to hell is paved with good intentions and the more she tries to help, the more she buries herself in this whole situation. That's kind of the concept with Harleen: She is a person with good intentions, with this idea that she wants to help the patients at Arkham, she wants to help humanity. What was the character you wanted to include the most? You've packed this first issue with tons of Easter eggs and references. RELATED: DC's Birds of Prey Canceled, Resolicited as Mature Readers Black Label Title

She's a smart person doing a dumb thing and that is essentially human. That's the core of the character for me, that's the thing that fascinates me from the get-go. Like any addict, they keep finding excuses to do the things they want to do. To me, the concept from the get-go is that she's a psychiatrist, a woman kind of trapped in her own mind who can comprehend her own psychosis, who can understand the severity of her own actions over time, and yet she finds new ways to justify herself, to justify her own actions, because the relationship she's in is effectively a defective one. She is a clown, she is a villain, to others she's an antihero. That's the great thing about this character created by Paul Dini and Bruce Timm: She is a lot of things to a lot of different storytellers. To that point, who is Harley Quinn to you as a storyteller? However, as a writer, you're facing the challenge of convincing the audience through the eyes of the character why they thought it might, why they thought it might succeed, why Harleen Quinzel thought she could help the Joker, why she could cure him, why she could save him.Īnd then, as a reader, you get to find out why it doesn't work.

That's one of the big things in Harleen, you know it's one of those romances that can't work in the end, you know it doesn't work in the work. There's a beauty in writing a romance that's doomed to succeed and there is a different kind of beauty in writing a romance that's doomed to fail. Romance, in general, is an opportunity to depict humanity at its most vulnerable emotional state and the more complicated the romance, the more intense response you can get from your characters the more intense a story you can write. What is it about that theme that you find interesting?Ĭomplicated romance is interesting to write about.

Something I've noticed across a lot of your work in Sunstone and Witchblade and here in Harleen is that you focus a lot on romance, especially complicated romance.

Stjepan sejic harleen 2