Did you think that was all I had on that particular run of Harley Quinn? Oh no, the pile is too vast to cut things off after only seventeen issues—this goes so much deeper than that. And for Stephanie Phillips’ run, that means we get to see how much more she can do with the character absent of the various events that coincided with the first stretch of issues she produced. But this time she’s joined with another team in Georges Duarte, Romulo Fajardo Jr., Simone Buonfantino, Matteo Lolli, David Baldeón, and Rain Beredo to round out her final arc.

When we last left Harley, things were in a bit of a state. Her, Batwoman, and Kevin had just prevented Verdict from blowing up city hall, but during their celebrations, her prison transport was intercepted by a duo of villains—the same duo that begin this arc chasing Harley down. But the hunting is less for murder and more headhunting—Luke Fox, better known at times as Batwing—needs her for a mission to the moon to retrieve a sample of unstable matter. And of course, because of reasons, this goes horribly wrong before the sapient matter is finally subdued by the team learning to work together. As a reward, Harley heads to Vegas to celebrate and in the process buys a boat, gets shot, dies, gets resurrected, and discovers the Dark Metal iteration of herself hunting down all of the Harleys of the Multiverse. Wasn’t this a Jet Li movie?

It’s in this final arc that Phillips really begins to move us into what she wanted for Harley from the beginning of her run: growth and change. We start with Harley wanting to become a better person—looking to make amends for the people she’s harmed due to her past. And here, at the end, we get her saving Gotham multiple times as well as saving every version of herself, including the one looking to murder her. There’s always going to be fights and punching in a superhero comic—that’s just a part of the formula—but the part of Harley with a PhD comes out more often than not to simply talk through things. She proves that she isn’t beholden to her past and that part of her character, but she can still look at those aspects of herself—every one from those different Multiverses—and save every version of herself.

One of the nicer things in monthly comics is when a creator can finish the story they wanted to tell. Often there’s a dip in interest or some kind of event that keeps a story from being told to its intended end. Here, we can watch Phillips take Harley on that journey over twenty eight issues to get to the heart of the character and show that she’s always been able to have a story on her own without a former boyfriend coming in to sap the fun out of the room. 

Get excited. Get independent.

Drew Barth (Episode 331, 485, 510, 651, & 674) resides in Winter Park, FL. He received his MFA from the University of Central Florida.