Elliott Kalan has, from his early career on The Daily Show and The Midnight Kalan, through his long tenure co-hosting The Flophouse, up to his recently prolific comics career, been a sort of Johnny Appleseed of shtick. When I say shtick, I mean it in its most historically situated sense – a Yiddish word deriving from the German Stück, meaning a piece, a slice, a discrete unit. In other words, a bit.
Shtick keeps one foot in Vaudeville – cares less about the finely honed setup and punchline than the peppermill barrage of, well, bits; puns, impressions, patter, a couple bars of song, a little bit of pratfalling. Whatever it takes to get a laugh, even if that laugh is won by good-natured attrition. Shtick wants the audience to want it, even if it’s willing to be assertively annoying to get there.
If this doesn’t sound all that fun or funny, that’s on me. Kalan is one of the funniest comics and writers around, and, for my vote, one of the most encyclopedic walking historians of American comedy. Like John Schwartzwelder in the ’90s keeping the flame of schmaltzy Weird Americana humor flickering with a steady supply of Simpsons gags about hobos, hucksters and hoary folkways, Kalan’s brand of rapid-fire associative deep pulls and semiotic ricochets is a masterclass in the continued relevance of Catskill and Vaudeville traditions.
So, while a straight guy taking over writing duties on Harley Quinn – one of DC’s most visible queer femme characters – might have prompted a resigned oh no by default, the announcement that Kalan specifically would be taking the baton from Tini Howard with last October’s issue #44 got a cautious hell yeah? out of me. Four issues in, I think it’s earned that hell yeah.
Harley Quinn, when she works, is also a creature of shtick. The carefully crafted joke, the elaborate Rube Goldberg-style prank – those aren’t her. Those are the domain of her shitty ex-boyfriend. Harley at her best is more about throwing things at the wall and improvising on whatever sticks – a source of both comedy and, often, pathos.
This is where Kalan picks up at the start of his run. Quasi-estranged from her girlfriend, Poison Ivy (see G. Willow Wilson’s provocative and introspective Poison Ivy) and fresh off the heels of an ill-advised fling with the neurotically and compulsively horny Janet-from-HR, aka “Sidequest” (see G. Willow Wilson’s hilarious portrait of a lesbian train wreck, Poison Ivy), not quite a member of the Bat family but no longer quite a supervillain, Harley finds herself at odds with her recent past and entirely at sea about what to do next. And, like many an adrift young adult with a doctorate she can’t quite put to good work, Harley settles on returning to her roots – to wit, the scuzzy and embattled but ruthlessly unpretentious neighborhood she landed in when she first moved to Gotham as a bright-eyed grad student, before Arkham, before the Joker, before the white greasepaint and booty shorts – Throatcutter Hill, so named “‘cuz in 1887 the mayor got his throat cut there” (in a sharp sight gag by penciller Mindy Lee, Throatcutter Hill is introduced via a bronze statue of that same mayor clutching his neck in shock).
To her horror, though, her old stomping grounds have become a gentrified, white-washed haven for Gotham’s yuppie elite in her years of absence. Newly christened Nowegosoe (“Northwest Gotham Southeast”), it has transformed into an enclave of cashless tchotchke shops, upscale high-concept restaurants and the looming, angular Nowegosoe Tower (“looks like if a frat boy started a hedge fund and then a witch turned him into a hedge fund” quips Harley on first approach). Harley’s disgust is immediate and visceral (“Where’s the trash? Where’s the stores run by people who hated you for trying to buy something? Where’s the character?”). Her response? To take this opportunity to restore her erstwhile home, and herself, to their proudly dirtbag roots. Kalan’s debut issue ends with our hero acting on this fresh mission statement, opening a “destructive agency” and explicating her intentions with a cute riff on a classic Raymond Chandler passage:
It’s a charming, flexible setup – it gives Harley a new base of operations, a new MO, and a rich ground for accruing a fresh crop of supporting characters. Kalan plays it light for the most part – at this point, he hasn’t reached for the pathos or tricky, heist-y plotting that defined Howard’s excellent run just prior – but is a sharp enough scripter to know when to pluck the reader’s sense of sentiment, and where to plant seeds for future melodrama (Harley’s flirty love-hate relationship with butch supervillain real estate mogul Althea Klang is a fun little subplot time-bomb, and he gets some charming mileage out of her dynamic with local transient vigilante Chicken Fingers).
The art reinforces this commitment – for now – to playing for laughs rather than reaching for high-stakes, ongoing drama. Mindy Lee’s figures are elastic and expressive, with an eye caricature reminiscent of Erica Henderson, or Max Sarin’s work on Giant Days. Triona Farrell’s colors are a standout as well, nimbly balancing the palettes of a Saturday morning cartoon, the West Elm beiges and silvers of the Nowegosoe aesthetic, and the dingier, earthier hues of the “real” Throatcutter Hill. It’s an eye-catching book, to be sure, with a clear visual signature that communicates the mission statement of Kalan’s first three stories – these are light, fun, one-off capers, with a light vein of serial elements. The violence is slapstick; Harley’s amoral instincts are more cheeky anarchic prankster than accessory to mass murder. Have a good time – don’t take this too seriously.
This all begins to shift – or at least, to complicate itself – in last week’s issue #47. The stakes are just a bit higher, Harley’s insecurity and need for direction a little more acute. Her investment in the people around her is reinforced, and by the end of the issue we’re more aware of the complexities of her return to the working-class Throatcutter Hill as something of a tourist herself. She has the capacity to be duped, and in turn she shows the capacity for an ominously Joker-esque sense of gleeful cruelty. No wonder Klang seems to suddenly recognize something of a kindred spirit in her, or at least an asset worth adding to her portfolio.
In other words, things might be starting to get real. Fault lines are starting to emerge in Harley’s cobbled-together alliance with Throatcutter Hill’s small business owners (we open with her taking gleeful advantage of a local bodega), between her and her landlord’s dopily besotted amateur DJ grandson – even between her and Chicken Fingers. If she ends the issue a little less confident in her “move fast and break stuff” approach to urban justice, the people around her seem even less sure, which at this point in the plot is a nicely subtle escalation of stakes that doesn’t go so far as to upset the still-satisfying formula.
The issue’s case of the week – which adheres to that “Harley is pointed at a symptom of gentrification and applies her bat” formula with a sort of predictable but still fun wrinkle – sees her hired by Dell Coleman, sous chef at a restaurant called Synesthesia (“Our gimmick is that all the food looks like other food. Noodles of extruded pork, cauliflower mulch molded into chicken drumsticks, that kind of thing.”). Dell’s pitch seems tailored to flatter our heroine’s present motivation – and, surprise, it is; he claims he’s been so inspired by her recent string of good-intentioned property damage that he’d like her to rob his bougie employer, driving it out of the neighborhood, which she’s more than happy to help out with.
Again, it’s not exactly a shock in the end when it turns out that Dell was in fact the owner of Synesthesia, and that his whole scheme hinges on that evergreen noir staple, insurance fraud. The reader’s sense of umbrage and betrayal is less important than that of Harley, who begins the issue being cautioned to think before jumping on opportunities that flatter her sense of being able to be a hero while still functionally just giving her a hall pass to smash things with her trusty arsenal of bludgeoning weapons. That the scheme she stumbles into is, on the face of it, sort of as hoary as they come just reinforces Kalan’s creeping sense that Harley is merely covering some of her worst impulses in a vaguely altruistic coating.
What is a very fun wrinkle lies in the fine points of Dell’s plan. Synesthesia, it turns out, has been rented out for the night, for a Clayface family reunion. Casual fans might be surprised at the sheer number of Clayfaces who turn up for this sequence – real Clayniacs will be delighted at Kalan’s Who’s Who deep pulls, from baby Cassius Payne (now a surly teen) and his parents (Clayfaces III and IV) to Gerry Duggan’s aptly named Clownface, a Joker-colored blob from 2022 who’s gotta be, I don’t know, Clayface IX or X at least. While the misunderstanding fight that ensues ensures Dell gets a juicy payout on his failing restaurant’s supervillain insurance policy, it also gives Lee an opportunity to show off her chops at creative, frenetic fight choreography.
It’s a satisfying, nicely paced underdog sort of brawl, in which Harley is pitted against, oh, let’s say 10 superpowered opponents. Lee makes the most out of the shared power set of most of the Clayfaces, offering wonderfully gloopy and menacing shots of weaponized mud that suggest haymaker and landslide in equal measure. Kalan, too, makes the most of the Clayface backlog by playing up the fact that not every Clayface has the familiar shapeshifting muck powers, eking both gags and fun action beats out of Preston Payne’s flesh-melting acid touch (and chic Mr. Freeze-style bubble helmet) and Sondra Fuller’s signature harpy-esque wings and talons ensemble.
Lee and Farrell nail a delicate pivot in tone here too, as Harley realizes she’s overpowered and outnumbered, and as her inner monologue turns to self-pity and hopelessness, her foes begin to mingle together, blurring from a distinct coterie of specific characters to a claustrophobic, suffocating sea of undifferentiated mud. There’s a truly unnerving panel toward the end of the fight, where she’s buried under a pile of tangled limbs, bodies and dripping, melting faces. While this never stops working as an action comedy, it suggests that Lee’s stylized, fluid style could kill on a horror book as well.
Harley pulls through, of course, with a last-minute gambit that sort of works for me. “Somethin’ tells me that clay don’t mix so good with formaldehyde,” she quips – and frankly, her guess is as good as mine. Aficionados of clay, or formaldehyde, or both can chime in with their expertise. What did land was the amusingly anticlimactic reveal that as soon as she shows an ace in the hole, the rest of the assembled ‘Faces realize they aren’t especially interested in a gratuitous fight – they were just here to eat, after all, and when it turns out that family patriarch Basil Karlo didn’t spring for an open bar, even that motivation evaporates – and simply leave her to wallow.
Executing a pivot from comedy to drama is tricky, and very strong comics have not quite nailed it. Harley’s dejection at the end of this story as she realizes she was played, as she questions what she’s even doing back at Throatcutter Hill, is poignant if a bit abrupt. The final scene, in which she responds to dopey admirer Richie with an ominously Joker-like bout of cruel laughter, might have hit harder if Richie was a bit less of a sad sack to begin with, less clearly and obliviously barking up the wrong tree. Still, Lee sells the visual of Harley’s resigned chuckle blossoming into outright glee in breaking someone else down, and Kalan is, I think, sharp in positioning this as the core kernel of tension here. Is she really doing good? Or is Throatcutter Hill’s David v. Goliath war against Nowegosoe just an excuse for her to exercise harm?
Not every joke in this issue – or the preceding three issues – lands. But that’s OK! So goes the nature of shtick. What matters is density: Nearly every panel is jazzed up with some bit of business, some throwaway absurdity or pun or sight gag. It’s a game of numbers, and sure enough, the jokes that got me got me. This aligns with Harley’s mission statement, her perhaps misguided intent to regain her sense of purpose and heroism through destruction. Maybe not every window she smashes is the right window (Dell Coleman proved as much), but if she errs toward justice enough, it’ll count for something, right?
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Holly Raymond
Holly Raymond is a writer and professor who lives in Vermont with her wife and her dog, King Francis.
