In 2019, DC Black Label released Joker/Harley: Criminal Sanity # 1, written by Kami Garcia with artwork by Mike Mayhew and Mico Suayan. Set in a gritty and realistic Gotham City that lacks the usual vigilantes the city is known for, a serial killer is loose. Only Harley Quinn, a psychiatrist brought on by the Gotham City Police Department to consult on this case, is close to stopping him. Now that this nine-issue series has finished its run, CBR attended a press outlet with Garcia to discuss the evolution of Joker/Harley: Criminal Sanity.
While Garcia was working on an original story for Titans -- which would eventually spawn three comic titles -- she pitched an original, young-adult Joker story. DC at the time was not committed to doing any YA villains. This preference eventually changed and DC released titles such as Harley Quinn: Breaking Glass and Victor and Nora: A Gotham Love Story. "It was the idea of what makes a regular kid turn into a monster," Garcia said. "I think in dialogue, it became clear that it was very dark and not really teen appropriate." This led to a new problem, as this would need to be aged up but remain out of continuity. At the time, Black Label wasn't up and running; however, DC encouraged Garcia not to abandon her Joker idea.
"I didn't know Black Label existed when I came up with the idea, but I knew it wasn't like DCU," Garcia added. "It wasn't in continuity. Later, I learned that Black Label was a thing, so I kind of created it knowing it wouldn't fit into DCU because it's a much more kind of realistic take." Eventually, Black Label came to be, so Garcia had a world for her story, which would expand, turning the original idea into Joker's backstory, while posing the question, "What would that look like in a realistic take on Joker?"
Working in Garcia's favor was her personal fascination with killers, her father's past as an undercover cop, and series' consultant Edward Kurz, MD. All of this would help flesh out what would become Joker/Harley: Criminal Sanity, a procedural comic where a profiler was after a serial killer with Harley Quinn as the profiler.
"If you get a particularly difficult case, you need somebody who has the next level of skills," Garcia said. "In the DCU... The obvious choice was Harley Quinn. It was a chance to redefine their relationship in a way where I could maintain the tension between the characters, and that kind of push and pull, but it wouldn't have to be a romantic relationship. Instead, she was going to be using her legit clinical psychiatry skills as a behavioral analyst to help out the police work."
Approaching Harley in this way opened the door for a deeper exploration of the character, including pulling focus from her abusive romantic relationship with the Joker, which has been touched on before in multiple media and was something. As Kurz mentioned to Garcia, he had never heard of happening between a psychiatrist of that caliber and a psychopath. So, Garcia looked at another area to explore Harley's survivor qualities: her family life.
"I just didn't want [Harley] to be a survivor of an abusive, romantic relationship with a criminal, so instead, she has a very abusive mother," Garcia said. "That way, I felt like it was able to maintain the part of her that is a survivor. The one thing I was the most excited to explore with her is how smart she is. Because she doesn't fall for the Joker. You have to be a medical doctor and go to med school to be a psychiatrist. I felt like I wanted to see her using the skills as much as possible and in different ways. I loved writing that. I loved seeing that."
This combination led to a Harley who's an "apex predator of apex predators," pursuing one of the deadliest threats Gotham has yet to face. While rewriting Harley and Joker's history, Garcia still wanted the characters to feel realistic and familiar. Garcia and her team even developed profiles for the titular characters. To properly represent both of these characters, Garcia dove deep into killers and the psychology around them, working hard to differentiate sanity from insanity.
"When you're dealing with real serial killers in real life, killers that are psychotic," Garcia said. "Psychosis is not the same thing as being deprived or sick. Psychosis actually means that you are delusional and you either hallucinate or you have delusional thinking. In the real world, serial killers that are delusional and psychotic are not difficult to catch. Zodiac, Gacy, Bundy, Ramirez --those are people who are all sane. Super sick, but sane."
Portraying a sane Joker is not a first and Garcia acknowledged Heath Ledger's Joker as a great example of this. His approach to Joker, where he is calculated, shrewd, strange, and aware of his wrongdoings is close to what Garcia wanted to accomplish.
"To me, a person who has a mental health issue, when they do something horrible, it's horrible, but it's also really sad and tragic," Garcia said. "When somebody who is totally sane goes out -- as if they were going to the bodega to get a six-pack of beer -- to hunt down the victim, and they 100 percent know that what they're doing is wrong, and they are just going out as an apex predator, to me, that is much more terrifying. That is what the Joker has always been to me."
To best tackle these issues and represent an authentic and horrific killer, Garcia turned to Kurz on multiple occasions. From crime scenes to Joker's makeup, Kurz was able to best profile the sort of murderer he was. "[Kurz] wanted all of the psychology of Joker, the killer, the way he operates," Garcia said. "Everything from his signature to the type of murders to align back with what would match that profile and nothing that didn't match the profile would make it in."
Garcia wasn't afraid to get dark with this Joker, even if it pushed her comfort zone. For instance, she went into the Joker's abusive past with his father. "The harder thing for me to write was when [Joker's] dad was pushing him around," Garcia said. "Hurting kids bothers me. There's something really disturbing to me when people hurt children and animals, especially just because I think it's a total other level of depravity."
Along with Kurz, two artists worked on the interiors: Mayhew and Suayan. Along with working on the series for almost two years due to a shifting schedule, the level of detail both artists turned out was on another level for Garcia -- even including 80 pages of remastered art in the collective series.
With a team like this and a fresh, grounded take on Harley and Joker, Garcia's original pitch about a YA Joker story turned into something much more mature, dark, and in the vein of Netflix's Mindhunter. The titular characters would be unique but still recognizable as Harley and Joker, thus making Joker/Harley: Criminal Sanity another stellar representation of what Black Label can do beyond the DC canon.