Today marks DC Comics’ fourth annual Batman Day, but this year there’s a twist: Harley Quinn is stealing the spotlight to celebrate her 25th anniversary. To commemorate the legacy of this comic book icon, we hopped on the phone with a few of Harley Quinn’s most prolific writers, who all gave us an insider perspective on how the Joker’s sidekick became what Jim Lee calls the fourth pillar of DC Comics alongside Batman, Wonder Woman, and Superman.
Harley Quinn first debuted in the “Joker’s Favor” episode of Batman: The Animated Series in September 1992. Writer Paul Dini needed a gang for the Joker and wanted to come up with something a bit different than the mafiosa-type guys Joker usually employs, so he decided to craft a Bonnie to the Joker’s Clyde. After coming up with the Harley Quinn concept and name, Dini brought the idea to Bruce Timm, who drew up the character in a harlequin/pied piper costume. Finally, Dini reached out to his friend and Days of Our Lives star Arleen Sorkin to lend her bubbly personality to Harley’s voice, the final touch on what would become one of DC’s most popular characters.
“She was a little harder edged, a little more wicked, I’d say, in that first appearance,” Dini recalled. “More of an underling, and certainly the romance angle between her and the Joker wasn’t really a part of it at that point. She was just a henchperson, and pretty much an order-taker. Although, there was sort of a fun dynamic to their relationship, where she might tell a joke and the other henchmen would laugh at it, and not so much for the Joker’s own jokes, and he would get a bit upset about that.”
Harley Quinn’s popularity quickly took off, and she made her comic book debut in The Batman Adventures #12 in September 1993. It wasn’t long before she made the jump to other mediums, including the live-action Birds of Prey show (played by Mia Sara), the Batman Arkham video games (voiced by Hynden Walch), and last year’s Suicide Squad movie (played by Margot Robbie). For Dini, there’s one quality that is a must for anyone playing Harley Quinn.
“It’s the attitude, that you can just be a wild, free spirit, and not be restrained about anything. Harley is this sense of manic joy, and I think that just about every actress who has played the part has captured that really, really well, whether they’re doing the New York accented version of Harley or if they’re just doing a bright, sunny, screwball character,” Dini explained. “For instance, in the Lego Batman movie, Jenny Slate really wasn’t doing the New York-based Harley accent, she was just doing somebody who was fun and loopy and out there, and making crazy adlibs and things like that, and that worked fine, too. And with Margot Robbie, the voice kind of came and went, and it could have a more sinister side, a more playful side. But it all works. As long as whoever’s doing the voice or acting as Harley is having fun with the role, then they’ve pretty much got the character down.”
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