Harley Quinn's Villain of the Year #1 // Review
The Harvey Awards are in October. The Eisner Awards are in July. There’s no awards season for the comics industry. Being December, however, it IS approaching somewhere near the middle of awards season for film and TV. In some strange corner of the DC universe, there’s an annual awards ceremony for supervillains that happens every year around this time. This year it’s being hosted by a very popular psycho clown girl in Harley Quinn’s Villain of the Year. The 30-page one-shot story is written by Mark Russell with art by Mike Norton. (There’s also a beautiful cover on the issue by Amanda Conner.) It’s a cute little bit of comedy in which Russell and Norton have been given license to have a little fun with the DC universe. The laughs themselves are a bit weak, but Russell and Norton host a fun, little 30-page party for anyone interested in attending.
Harley Quinn has been invited to host the Annual Villain Awards. Lex Luthor has received an anonymous threatening letter. He’s offering Quinn a gift of some sort for figuring out who it is that is threatening the awards ceremony. With this rather flimsy premise firmly in place, the issue heads off into a full issue-length awards program complete with nominees, acceptance speeches, and the inevitable confrontation with the villain threatening the ceremony.
The silliness of the premise aside, Russell actually puts together a fairly tight 30 pages of awards in an issue that plays on all the traditional elements of a televised awards program. Every award gets the traditional announced list of nominees followed by the lucky villain accepting the award. With 30 pages, the format never has a chance to get dull. Harley plays it like an awards host throughout the issue, making slightly lame jokes in a progression of different costumes, gradually leading to the inevitable climactic conclusion. It’s a very, very silly exercise, but it’s one that Russell commits to for the full issue from the “In Memoriam” segment, which opens the installment to the award for Villain of the Year at issue’s end.
Amanda Conner’s cover is gorgeous. It’s too bad she didn’t do the full issue. There’s a real classiness about her approach to the art that suits the awards format quite well. Norton’s execution on the inside of the issue is far from a disappointment, though. There’s some genuine personality in the eclectic collection of villains in tuxes, evening gowns, and more tuxes. It isn’t easy to make an awards ceremony look interesting. Still, Norton does a pretty good job of getting it to work for 20 pages...a lot of the success here lies in being every bit as committed to following through with the format of the comedy for all 30 pages. Norton doesn’t try to do anything fancy with the format...simply allowing the strangeness of a 30-page awards ceremony for DC supervillains to do its thing.
Superhero comedy rarely works very well. Supervillain comedy? It almost works here. It may not be brilliant, and for the most part, there really isn’t anything to laugh at here, but it’s a fun, little bit of strangeness for the end of the year.
