mad-love-batmanI am a comic book geek (or recent con­vert) but am unfa­mil­iar with the canon of pop­u­lar comic book sto­ries. I am unqual­i­fied to com­pare and con­trast any­thing in this genre. Mov­ing for­ward, I picked up MAD LOVE (2009) because for some odd rea­son I have a fas­ci­na­tion with the Joker. The Joker is a rather inter­est­ing vil­lain to me. He’s dark, edgy, psy­chotic and wholly unpre­dictable. Did you know that some­one actu­ally fell in love with the Clown Prince? This brings us to “Mad Love” the main story arc that’s high­lighted in this hard­cover reprint edi­tion pub­lished by DC comics.

Mad Love is a love story, of sorts, as the title sug­gests. The Joker, who has escaped from Arkham is still deter­mined to destroy Bat­man, as usual, in some elab­o­rate mas­ter plan. Only this time he has an accom­plice: Harley Quinzel. Miss Quinzel is a psy­chi­a­trist work­ing at Arkham who befriends the Joker. She laughs at his jokes and gives him a sym­pa­thetic ear. She believes his lies and he gains her trust. Even­tu­ally she falls madly, deeply in love with the clown and breaks him free. She also sheds her good girl per­sona and changes her name from Harley Quinzel to Harley Quinn. There’s back­story on Ms. Quinn that showed just a hint of mis­chie­vous­ness that log­i­cally explains her character’s trans­for­ma­tion. Mov­ing on.

Since the two have been together, Harley Quinn’s affec­tions for her “pud­din” seems to be one-sided. She blames Bat­man for stand­ing in the way of their love and decides to do some­thing about it. So, she plots and schemes and actu­ally suc­ceeds where Joker has failed only he doesn’t see it that way. No. Joker’s rather large ego allows Bat­man to use that to his advan­tage in the cli­max of the story. My take on this love story: awe­some sto­ry­line and dia­logue. I enjoyed it immensely. Almost worth the cost of the hard­cover price. Art­work — very nice as well. Also, I liked that even though Harley was never taken seri­ously, she was no dummy. She had a brain and she used it. Too bad she had poor taste in men.

As for the other sto­ries, well, none were as good as Mad Love unfor­tu­nately but are worth read­ing I guess. One of the other sto­ries I just skimmed com­pletely. The other tales fea­tured Scare­crow (that was good), Two-face, Bat-girl even puts in an appear­ance as does Batman’s adver­sary Selena Kyle aka Cat­woman. There’s also the Arnold Wesker aka the “ven­tril­o­quist” and Scar­face story (weak) among a few oth­ers. Sim­ple, quick read. Worth read­ing at the library for the Mad Love story as that was quite excel­lent. B.