I’ve speculated before that with every new team on the Harley Quinn title, DC is trying to find the perfect formula. Harley is likely up there among DC’s most profitable characters, and the trick is to parlay that into more; it’s the reason of course why Batman is so ubiquitous. Amanda Conner and Jimmy Palmiotti’s Harley Quinn was a classic, but did nothing to draw the Harley-curious into the larger DCU; Sam Humphries' run tried to rectify that, involving Harley in crossovers like “Year of the Villain,” while Stephanie Phillips' run positioned Harley squarely in the day-to-day of James Tynion’s Batman.
Somewhere toward the end of Phillips' run, someone in the pipeline apparently decided Harley’s next great frontier is the multiverse, between Phillips' Harley Quinn Vol. 5: Who Killed Harley Quinn? and Frank Tieri’s Multiversity: Harley Screws Up the DCU, and now new series writer Tini Howard’s Harley Quinn Vol. 1: Girl in a Crisis. This first volume is mostly setup, and we know writers and runs have a shelf life in the Dawn of DC era, but I’ll be curious what Howard does with the multiverse landscape before she’s done. The extent to which Harley’s multiversal escapades coincide with her Knight Terrors tie-in certainly suggests DC’s eagerness to grab some eyeballs.
