Growing old disgracefully: DC comics' Harley Quinn turns 25

The joke’s on Batman this year. Fans of the Caped Crusader usually celebrate Batman Day on September 23, but this year his thunder has been stolen by a young woman wielding a giant mallet and wearing a broad grin. On September 11, Harley Quinn turns 25 years old – and the former psychiatrist who turned to the dark side in 1992 as a sidekick to The Joker celebrates her silver anniversary as a fully rounded DC Comics multi-platform villainess.

But who is Harley Quinn – and why is a relative newcomer being granted a privilege usually afforded to the most celebrated of DC’s comic book stable? Simply put, she is a phenomenon who, since beginning life as a background stooge, has routinely matched, and occasionally outsold, the publisher’s Golden Age trinity of Batman, Superman and Wonder Woman to become the official fourth pillar of DC.

But the character’s significance reaches far beyond the printed page. Harley Quinn’s success highlights that agile consumer content is not necessarily based upon genre or legacy – but upon fluidity of content. For her audience, Harley Quinn combines the pleasures of narrative with those of participation – in other words, she is not merely a comic book character to consume passively. She is an experience.
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