The following contains spoilers for Harley Quinn #25, now on sale from DC Comics
Exploring the multiverse has become an increasingly widespread storytelling beat in recent years. Plenty of comics, movies, and TV shows have dealt with the concept, with some using the opportunity to explore countless reimaginings of fixtures in their respective universes. The latest character to get their own take on that kind of story is Harley Quinn -- and it looks like her team-up might have some lethal consequences if she and her variants fail to properly team-up.
Harley Quin's official team-up with another version of herself -- and the arrival of plenty of other Harley variants -- quietly turns Harley Quinn #25 (by Stephanie Phillips, Matteo Lolli, David Baldeon, Rain Beredo, and Deron Bennett) into her own personal version of Spider-Verse. But while the Marvel event introduced plenty of alternate takes on Spider-Man and who is under the mask, Harley Quinn seems more focused on exploring various forms of Harley who've gone through some very different experiences.
Harley Quinn is Her Own Worse Enemy - Literally
Harley Quinn has found herself targeted by her worst nightmare -- the Harley Who Laughs. This villain is a vicious variant of herself who has been traveling across the multiverse hunting down their alternate-reality counterparts. The core-DC Universe Harley only escaped this plan thanks to her friend Kev, who was able to restore her to life with the use of a Lazarus Pit. But the realization of what her plan entails comes with some unexpected help in the form of Old Lady Harley.
Another target of the Harley Who Laughs, that variant was able to at least utilize the villain's tech for herself. She escaped into Earth-0 and quickly allied herself with the modern-day Harley. Quickly devising a plan -- and calling in an assist from Killer Frost -- the two are able to separate the Harley Who Laughs from her dimension-hopping device. In an effort to save her older variant from their villainous counterpart, Harley is forced to damage the universe-hopping technology. But in the process, Harley ends up opening a lot of other dimensional portals allowing at least a dozen more versions of the character to appear in the core-DC Universe.
Harley Quinn: Across The Harley-Verse
Harley's latest adventure makes her just the most recent superhero to embark on a wild multiversal team-up. The issue is coming out less than a month after the debut of the new trailer for Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, which continues the story of the Marvel web-swingers and their similarly varied counterparts. In essence, Harley is getting her own take on a Spider-Verse-style story. Even the Harley Who Laughs has some surface-level similarities to how villains from the comic-based Spider-Verse events like the Inheritors and the monstrous Shathra made it their mission to wipe out all their Spider-Heroes.
Notably, Harley's variants run a similar gamut in terms of origin and status. Some of them seem to hail from radically different timelines, where Harley was born a mermaid or constructed as a robot. One Harley seems to be a pirate variant of the anti-hero -- likely from Earth-31, the home of other pirate variants like Leatherwing. The most potentially interesting variant of Harley glimpsed in the crowd is one who is still wearing her original costume -- suggesting that there's at least one version of Harley who hasn't yet broken free of the Joker's thrall. Harley's brush with death has forced her to confront the kind of woman she's become, and it seems like she's about to get a peek into who else she could have been.