Multiversity: Harley does something

Second of the new series to have Multiversity branding focused on Harley. Not the character that would come to mind when thinking about multiverse, but thinking outside of the box sometimes leads to interesting results. So, what about this one?

The story goes that sometime during New 52 Dan DiDio looked at how well Deadpool was selling at Marvel and decided to replicate that success with Harley. The job was given to Conner/Palmiotti duo and they ran away with it. They revamped the character, made her a bit more similar to Deadpool than she was before and you could argue that they removed some complexity from her as well. Some fans have even argued that they destroyed the character, but since it was a massive sales hit... DC probably doesn't care about that at all.

Once Conner/Palmiotti ended their run other writers tried to leave their own mark on the character and while the difference is not obvious I'd say that she is not the same as she was during Conner/Palmiotti run. Anyway I'm writing all this to remind people that Conner and Palmiotti didn't write everything Harley back then, they had some help from Frank Tieri who replicated their style rather well. And well, he wrote this Multiversity mini so you know what to expect. Random moments and jokes about someone touching Harley's ass and so on.

So with that out of the way, how was the story? Marvel did that Deadpool story where he kills Marvel Universe and when this was announced I saw some snide comments about how Harley is copying Deadpool again. But I don't really see it? Basic idea is that Harley got time machine and by accident screws up origins for JL founders. This leads to no JL being formed and this is obviously a bad thing so Harley has to time travel again to fix it. Oh, and one of the villains is obvious not-Deadpool character because that is funny, I guess.

It is an okay story with some twists and turns and callbacks to previous Tieri's work with Harley. And there is a moment towards the end where Harley forgets to fix Aquaman's origin and I wonder if this was just another random joke or Tieri did a clever bit about how DC had dropped the ball with Aquaman in recent years. Anyway, this joke probably means that this mini is not supposed to be in-continuity, but to me Conner/Palmiotti run existing somewhere out there was one of the reason why it worked so maybe Tieri is just working in the same framework.

Anyway, obvious question here is... what this has to do with multiverse if Harley is time traveling? Tieri even makes a point about alternate timelines not being the same as alternate universes. And I have no answer to that. This is second mini with Multiversity branding and DC already made the whole concept confusing. And while, from what I have seen, this was not a sales hit it is likely to sell better than Teen Justice mini in the long run. So more people will probably think that Multiversity branding is about ass jokes and not about the multiverse.

Get it if you have fond memories of Conner/Palmiotti/Tieri Harley, but other than that it is an easy skip.

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