This made absolutely no impression on me. I was only half following the story. What I picked up seemed pretty stupid though. Definitely lacks the charThis made absolutely no impression on me. I was only half following the story. What I picked up seemed pretty stupid though. Definitely lacks the charm of my favourite Paul Dini work....more
Better written and better drawn than most comic material but I think it makes the fatal error of taking comic characters far too seriously and over-anBetter written and better drawn than most comic material but I think it makes the fatal error of taking comic characters far too seriously and over-analysing them. I like the fact that this HQ is a real person with a real internal world. I like the effort made to explain her transformation from compassionate psychiatrist to deranged mass-killer. Do I find the explanation to be remotely convincing? Hell no! It's a really difficult transformation to explain but there's also a difficult balancing act to deal with. If you don't take her character at all seriously then she becomes an uninteresting template, a sexy femme fatale, a gruesome horror dame, a wacky comic relief. She's too interesting and too compelling to deserve such treatment. But take her story too seriously and you miss the whole point: She's supposed to be silly, comical, cartoonish. This story spends a long time painting out her psychological dimensions then at the last moment flips from "I'm starting to lose my grip" to "Welp, I guess I'm a full time psycho now..." It just isn't credible and it isn't especially satisfying either. I think Alan Moore made a similar observation years after he wrote the Killing Joke. Comic book characters aren't SUPPOSED to be totally 3 dimensional, psychologically plausible creations. If you take that approach too far you wind up in absurd positions like trying to desperately convince an incredulous reader of the plausibility of an utterly implausible transformation.
In short, I think the Ideal HQ story has to find the right balance between realism and cartoon silliness. The Paul Dini material walks that line comfortably. The Amanda Conner material flies right off into the wacko universe and elicits fountains of vomit as it does so. Šejić's HQ does the opposite and presents us with a character so real that her ultimate role as Joker's accomplice becomes inherently unconvincing.
I prefer this to Amanda Conner's deranged nonsense. I still don't think it's the correct way to present this character....more
Completely asinine. I think it's material like this which has led to the absolute abomination that is Margot Robbie's Harley Quinn. Reads like it's wrCompletely asinine. I think it's material like this which has led to the absolute abomination that is Margot Robbie's Harley Quinn. Reads like it's written by a hyperactive teenager with a dreadful sense of humour. Hideous, gross, unfunny, idiotic. Just a total waste of human resources.
The Paul Dini stuff is hardly towering literature but it's Shakespearean compared to this....more
It's ok. Has some interesting details. I don't like it as much as the earlier Dini/Harley stuff.It's ok. Has some interesting details. I don't like it as much as the earlier Dini/Harley stuff....more
It's as good as the other Paul Dini stuff but I much prefer the more cartoony art style of Mad Love and Harley and Ivy.It's as good as the other Paul Dini stuff but I much prefer the more cartoony art style of Mad Love and Harley and Ivy....more
I really enjoyed this. It was a really sweet story with some well thought out characters. The only other manga series I've read is death note. This diI really enjoyed this. It was a really sweet story with some well thought out characters. The only other manga series I've read is death note. This didn't have the same crazily complex story that death note had but from a dramatic perspective it was a lot better written and it was also a lot easier to like.
I was introduced to this series via the anime movie. I thought the film was a total train wreck. I liked the characters and the premise but the character motivations were very fuzzily sketched out. Characters would do things like deciding to end their life or insulting all their friends or apologise when they hadn't done anything wrong and there never seemed to be any clear reason or logic behind their behaviour. It just seemed like bad writing. So the movie is pretty crap. But I liked the basic material enough to want to track down the manga.
Everything in the manga makes way more sense. The inexplicable quality of the behaviour of all the characters is dispelled by a much more expansive storytelling canvas. In this manga series the writer has time to explain where she's coming from with each of her characters and why they're doing the things they're doing.
It's just a lovely manga. Maybe I just liked this for some arbitrary reasons but to me it genuinely seemed like an excellently well written piece of fiction. Oima seems like a really perceptive writer with lots of ideas and interesting things to say through her characters. The characters aren't super complex but their basic motivations are very well fleshed out and make sense in a way that is logical enough to be satisfying and illogical enough to be true to life.
I suspect that it won't make a long lasting impact on me as it was a little bit light-weight but at the moment I feel like it was actually a pretty high quality piece of work. Strongly recommended for any graphic novel fans.
Incidentally my average rating for the whole series is 4.7. Pretty good....more