Writer Tini Howard has been a creative force behind two of Gotham City’s most complex women for over a year now. In Harley Quinn, Howard and artist Sweeney Boo have taken the DC Universe’s favorite psychiatrist on a mystery spanning the multiverse, where someone has been killing off Harleys on various Earths. Harley must get to the bottom of this mystery, while also smoothing things over with her tattooed clown friend, Kevin, and making time to mentor her students. That’s right, Harley Quinn is an adjunct professor of psychiatry right now!

Meanwhile, Selina Kyle is out of Gotham City in the current arc of Catwoman, where she’s been gifted nine chances—nine lives—to do good in the world. That’s forced Selina to be more intentional about where and how she spends her time, while giving her a metaphysical mystery to unravel—namely, how she ended up in this strange predicament to begin with!

With both titles going stronger than ever, Howard has quietly become one of DC’s most consistent ongoing writers (her two years on Catwoman makes her the longest-running writer on the book since it relaunched in 2018). As such, the time seemed more than right to finally sit down with her to discuss the journeys that these two nuanced heroes have been on, and what went into writing them.

First, for people who haven’t been reading, would you mind telling us a bit about what Catwoman and Harley Quinn have been up to lately?

I’d love to! Catwoman is in the middle of her “Nine Lives” storyline, which spun out of “Gotham War.” Ever since her death underneath Vandal Savage’s meteorite, Selina has been…coming back. Mysterious visions of the goddess Bastet plague her, and nine marks on her back seem to coincide with her lives and deaths. With nine literal lives, Selina’s been taking on the most lethal missions on her list, scores she’s put off because they were just too risky…but she’s losing lives faster than she meant to. Her spiritual journey takes her to all corners of the DC Universe—to the most toxic places on Earth, to great depths and heights, and even a turn on the Suicide Squad.

Harley Quinn has just been banned from the Multiverse after a year of reality-threatening shenanigans. Having made peace with the Brothers Eye and defending both Gotham City and Warworld (Earth-48), she’s back teaching classes in Gotham City, and living with Ivy, who encourages her to embrace what she’s passionate about—costumed criminals. So she puts on her classic suit again and goes to hang with the bad guys to see what makes them tick. Natacha Bustos joins us for the first three issues of this arc and she’s INCREDIBLE. And if you’ve been a fan of Sweeney Boo, she’s back for the next three! Definitely pick up issue #38 if you’re looking to hop on a Harley Quinn book again. It’s a great starting place, and we’re bringing in some of my favorite Gotham characters, as well as a great new villain for Harley.

What is it about Harley Quinn and Catwoman that you’re drawn to?

I always say Harley Quinn is about life from the point of view of the weird ones. I’ve always been a weird one. I’ve always felt different, and as I get older, I realize how special it is to be different! I love writing Harley with her slightly-too-intense feelings, struggling with being the protagonist.  I feel like I can get so raw with her, even though she’s also very funny. Additionally, I struggle with mental illness, and humor is definitely a coping mechanism for me, so Harley’s a great outlet for the dark sense of humor that comes with being, well, a little crazy and with accepting the things that have happened to you. I’m a little crazy too, it’s okay. You can come be crazy with us, if you want.

Catwoman has been one of my favorite characters for a long, long time. In pop culture, she’s practically the example of a certain kind of feminine power—quiet, patient, dark, alluring. I think she’s a character who can really effectively understand people’s desires and lay them bare, while she uses disguise and escape herself to avoid her own desires ever being seen. She loves to nurture others and care for strays, she always has. But as for what she wants, well, she can be a bit of a cipher. The pleasure of writing her is spending time alone with her, with seeing inside the head of a woman who so often appears in other stories as a mystery. I love to be alone with Selina, and I share that with the readers on the page. You get to be alone with her too, and she’s fascinating.

How do you balance the comedic and darker elements of Harley’s character?

For me, it’s very linked to a certain kind of playfully self-effacing mental-illness mindset. It’s something you see a lot now that we’re all getting online and talking about our worst selves via memes, but there’s really something to laughing about your trauma. Laughing can be a way to experience emotions around something that hurts without engaging with it directly.

Harley’s sense of humor, to me, is that redirect of emotions—it’s an “I’m feelin’ a lot, let’s laugh insteada cryin’” mindset. It’s not that we never cry about it, it’s part of healing, but…I don’t know. When you’re mentally ill, sometimes HUGE emotions hit you at very inappropriate times, and…laughing is just a good redirect for that. I put that into Harley because it connects her to something that’s very real to me. She can make a great joke at a great moment or a terrible one. She also isn’t very good at playing cool, which makes her fun to write. She’s happy to cheer, to gloat, to scream, to cry.

Harley is currently in a multiverse story, which is already exciting for a character like her. What’s unique about this story is the role that trauma plays within the multiverse itself, with Brother Eye noting in issue #35 that “Traumas make the multiverse.” What led you to take this approach with the multiverse? It’s a fascinating one.

Oh, that’s the great Grant Morrison, baby. It’s in Final Crisis, I think, or maybe Multiversity? One of those has this beautiful page I sent over to the team—we call back to it—that shows the multiverses splitting, almost like cells, and the idea that any event that causes change, i.e, trauma, is a breaking point for a multiverse.

So, you have a cell, you smack it, and then you have two cells—the one that was Smacked and the one that Wasn’t and now those are two different things, because of the Trauma of the Smacking. Am I making sense? I’m not Grant.

It’s really beautiful to me, the idea that having experienced trauma didn’t make Harley what she was and it also wasn’t inherent to her. It’s simply that she is, like all of us, a multiverse unto herself, and every change is a trauma to current stasis. What the meme kids like to call “a canon event”?

I think part of what makes your Harley Quinn and Catwoman series so engaging to read is the distinctive sense of voice that both characters have, and how they expand beyond the genres we expect to see them in. What guides your writing process for giving Selina and Harley their own unique feel?

Haha, I’ve been writing them for so long, they now just feel like friends in my head I call up and talk through their feelings. But it definitely takes work!

I have always done a lot of tabletop roleplaying, Dungeons and Dragons and stuff like that, so understanding a character and giving them a voice is just second nature to me at this point. It’s one of the first things about a book I understand—I just get a gut feeling of her, and then I can learn more by asking myself questions. (If you want to try this process of building a character for yourself, lots of people online have made ‘character questionnaires’ designed for roleplay characters, but I like them for writing, too.) Sometimes it’s easier to reject choices than make them, so a tool like this can be helpful. I can go down a list of questions, like, what’s her favorite song? Biggest fear? What would she do in X situation? In Y? What are her thoughts on Z?  And by the end of that exercise, I have such a clear idea of who I’m writing about and what she has to say.

By taking both Catwoman and Harley out of Gotham City and their expected environments, you’ve made the case for why these two women are so much more than Batman-adjacent characters. Can we expect to see more of this in the future? Catwoman’s adventures in Kahndaq were so much fun!

Thank you! I had a blast with that one, I think it shows.

For one, I don’t like to bore our artists or our readers, visually. Gotham City is beautiful, and we’ve had fun creating visually distinct locations within—the Trixie, the Kitty Kat Room, Gotham Community College, for example—but I like us to all get to stretch. It’s also just one of those things where you take over a book and you decide that you want to “play the hits,” as my friend Gerry Duggan would say. Gotta have some Gotham in there, but also, what do you want to do, as the writer? What are the things that feel like layups that you’ve never seen anyone else do the way you want to do them? For me, that was the genesis of a lot of these “Nine Lives” missions—Selina in space, Selina on the Suicide Squad, Selina carrying radioactive material out of a nuclear power plant. They’re all things I just wanted to make happen! Same with a lot of Harley engaging with the Morrisonian multiverse theories. I couldn’t help myself. That’s one of the biggest pleasures of this job—reaching into your favorite stories of the past and linking them to the character’s bright future.
 

Catwoman #63 by Tini Howard, Carmine Di Giandomenico and Veronica Gandini is now available in print and as a digital comic book.

Harley Quinn #38 by Tini Howard, Natacha Bustos and Nick Filardi is available in print and digital on March 26^th.