Without getting into the myriad of reasons of why, exactly, it was doomed to fail, one of the most egregious errors the reboot made involved Harley Quinn, with DC having attempted to synergise the character's looks with the edgier, less iconic redesign that had appeared in Rocksteady's Arkham series. This entailed a new origin (which we'll get to in a moment), but also some bizarre alterations that came in 2011's Suicide Squad comic.
There, Harley began a romance with Deadshot, and exemplified pretty much every comic book cliché when it comes to the design and characterisation of women in the medium.
The series itself was a critical flop, and while other characters featured throughout the run fared no better, none emerged worse than Harley, who again, seemed to typify all that was wrong with the relaunch's attitude to women on and off the page.
WhatCulture's very own resident movie guy, Ewan has been working in the content creation biz for over 10 years now, having started as a freelance contributor to WhatCulture Gaming all the way back in 2015. After graduating with a First-Class Honours in History from Northumbria University in 2017 (where he won a prize for a totally killer dissertation on the Watergate years), Ewan took on the role of Comics Editor at WhatCulture and quickly developed WhatCulture Comics into one of the biggest superhero-focused channels on YouTube. He followed this with a brief hiatus at Screen Rant in 2021, where he worked across the Gaming and Film sections as a writer and editor, before returning to WhatCulture as a Senior Content Producer / Presenter in 2023. He started his own podcast, We Love Dad Movies, in 2022, and has contributed several written pieces to the Eisner-nominated comics website Shelfdust as well.
In his current role, Ewan incorporates his love of cinema, comic books, and history into written pieces and video essays for WhatCulture's Film & TV channel, as well as WhatCulture Gaming and WhatCulture Horror, with a particular focus on nineties-era Dad Movies, old school Westerns, and Golden Age Hollywood Noir. John Carpenter is his fave, and he thinks Batman Beyond should never have been cancelled. If that's your vibe, you'll probably like his stuff.
