Harley Quinn's Children Redefine Her Battle Against the Joker
Warning: Contains Spoilers for Batman: Beyond the White Knight #1
While Harley Quinn escaped the Joker in the ever-continuing Batman: White Knight storyline, her children are redefining her battle against him. The back-and-forth between the Joker and Harley Quinn has been a staple for their characters. It's always been interesting to see Harley grow tired of the Joker's abusive actions towards her and set herself on her own path toward independent villainy...occasionally being joined by Poison Ivy as well. What's interesting about Sean Murphy's White Knight series though is the direction he takes Quinn for his own story after supposedly killing off the Joker.
Since the death of the Joker, Harley Quinn has been making steps toward picking up where her life left off as her alter ego, Harleen Quinzel, before she was molded by the Clown Prince. She's been raising her children on her own and been doing her best to be a single mother to make sure they never end up like she did. She put the spandex back on once to help solve a case involving the Starlet and the Producer in her own miniseries, but after that, she's been laying low again. Unfortunately, it looks like her past is starting to catch up to her again as shown through her children that she's been trying to shield from the Joker's influence for so long.
Batman: Beyond the White Knight has a startling segment where Harley's daughter walks into their apartment and bares a shocking resemblance to her father, the Joker. She's colored her hair purple to match his iconic coat with sprinkles of green and purple in her outfit, making it undeniable that she's drawn a lot of influence from him. What's most haunting though is her smile, which is wide and unmistakably Joker-esque. For years, Harleen has been trying to protect these kids from their father's side to prevent something like this from happening, and now her worst nightmares are becoming reality: the Joker has tightened his grasp around her children, even in death.
The reason why this is so interesting is that it shows that Harley has sadly not been able to escape the Joker. Even after killing him in Curse of the White Knight, he's still found a way to haunt her, and it's through the people that she loves most of all. "Maybe I'm supposed to be more like the Joker," Jackie tells her mother after being slapped, "and that's what scares you." There's no doubt that Jackie is right when she says this. Harley thought that she was finally free from the man that tormented her for years, and now she's having to face what she thought was finally over all over again...and it's staring her in the face through the eyes of someone she cares deeply about after years of raising her.
Of course, the startling end to Beyond the White Knight shows that it's going to be more than Jackie that Harley needs to deal with in this new arc. When Bruce manages to escape prison, he runs square into what looks to be the Joker, alive and well, waiting for him. Whether this is the same Joker that fathered Harley's children somehow back from the dead or a new person to take the name, Harley's bound to be in for another heart-wrenching bout with the trauma she's endured for years. Until she discovers this new Joker in later issues though, the battle between Harley Quinn and the Joker has officially been redefined, and it's through the children that she thought she could protect from their father even after she killed him.