Harley Quinn 013- Night and Day

Harley Quinn has appeared a few times on my blog, but so far I has not much said about her background. Her character was invented for the 1992 Batman cartoons, and she became so popular that she has been transferred to the comics.
Her really name is Dr. Harleen Frances Quinze, and originally she was psychiatrist of Arkham Asylum, and then she has gone crazy and fell in love with Joker. In addition she has latent lesbian relationship with Poison Ivy. Her Funnily crazy character quotes the Silver Age Joker.

Now, let's move on to the story.

Lana and Rick Jensen, the first American astronaut husband-and-wife team has gotten a strange radiation during their moon trip. It makes them to turn into monsters in moon light: Lady Luna who is light, gravity-resistant, and floats through solid objects, and Moonrock who is super-strong and creates a gravitational field.

They are kept under special protection field in the Star Lab. Joker breaks into here to release and jokerize them.

Meanwhile, Harley convinces her roommate, Poison Ivy in vain to join her in trying the freshly stolen motor. So she takes a circle herself. She comes across Moonrock and Lady Luna, who have been sent by Joker. Harley is happy that her love needs her, but she is disappointed to be forced to acknowledge that the Joker sent the two monsters to kill her.

Fortunately, Harley takes advantage of the monster couple's cooing and can manage to escape to Ivy.

Of course, here, they also rush them, but so far Harley has could prepare a tomato, by which she can administer Poison Ivy's universal antidote to Moonrock.

By this, the monster retransforms into a human. In few moments, the sun rises and Lady Luna also turns into a human by herself, but she get the antidote too that the jokerization can pass. It's all right. Well, only almost, because Rick goes back to Moonrock by the sunlight. One half of the loving couple is always monster still the other half is human; they could never belong to each other.

Fortunately, however, instead to kill the girls, they decide to go back to the STAR lab finding a solution to their problem. At the end, Harley and Ivy are reconciled (namely Ivy has been a bit mad at the fact that Harley just came back to save her own life).

Karl Kesel's story is good. The monster-lovers, and as Harley ruin their relationship, are specifically funny. However, this can not fill the booklet, so the rest is fairly flat peppered with some joke and not too exciting action scenes. Chuck Dixon should have said about the proposal, then, this story probably would not have been such a contradiction in the main story (there, Joker asked Harley's hand, she said no, and therefore he wanted to kill her; here, Harley eagerly expects the offer but instead Joker just want to kill her). Pete Woods' draws are much better than in the mainstory. Although, he works with relatively few lines, his draws look more elaborated and less stylized (The coloring, Peter Pantazis adds a lot too). It is almost perfect except some facial expressions.

The original Hungarian blog post is here.