At last, the Future is here! After months of teasing from DC Comics, The Future State has arrived and one of the first books this week is Harley Quinn 1. With a title like Future State, I expected this title to jump into the future, but this is not only the real Harleen Quinzel. It feels like this could happen in the current time save the crime fighter she aids in these pages – Jonathan Crane.

What does it take to scare the fear out of Scarecrow? The Magistrate. The new Gotham order appears to have scared Jonathan Crane straight, but then again he does work for evil still. Thanks to the magistrate Crane renounced his Scarecrow identity and helps them hunt down rogues and masked men. It appears he has come to a dead-end and continues to have problems with certain rogues, so who does he turn to? One Harleen Quinzel, former phycologist and knower of underground secrets.

Crane agrees to give Harley certain freedoms if she helps him bring down rogues like Professor Pyg and Firefly, but Crane’s true target is none other than Roman Sionis, the Black Mask.

Harley Quinn 1 – Harley, Not Harley

I am really torn on this issue. It both tells a good story and misses the mark as far as Harley goes. The story is quite good and I look forward to the Black Mask confrontation coming in her next issue, but at the same time, it really did not feel like Harley. The quips were off, the accent never surfaces, and in many ways, she spent more time being Harleen Quinzel than Harley Quinn. I feel like the way they portrayed her took all the work done through her title and the recent Batman issues and threw it all out the window. She is now Joker’s enemy and tries to be one of the good guys. You do not sense any of that here.

The animation in Harley Quinn 1 bothers me because it’s both good and wrong. The overall quality looks great. The colors and details come across as sharp and vivid, but it looks too much like a cross between an anime style and something BOOM! Studios would do. It looks great. It just doesn’t feel like Harley. Overall, I like this title, it just felt a bit off. It’s the difference between a crew that can write about something and a crew that can become something from that place and time.

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