The Grace of Gilda, Pt. 2: Her First Post-Crisis Years

[about_faces]

Note: This is the second part of my retrospective of Gilda, a complete history of the oft-overlooked woman who loved and lost Harvey Dent. You can read Part 1 here, and subsequent installments will be released weekly.

Comments

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I guess I tend to fall first into the 'ooh, wouldn't it be interesting if' camp. Obviously, there are things I really don't want done to my favorite characters, but they are still characters, and one of the best things about characters (especially long-running ones) is the ability to experiment with them.

I've only read bits and pieces of Punchline, but the impression I get of her is that she's primarily a cynical opportunist who sees the Joker's craziness as a sort of career opportunity - something that the Joker knows and finds funny, so he goes along with it. She's more concerned with herself first, as is evidenced by the (I believe) current storyline where she's playing herself off as an innocent, seduced victim in order to gain public sympathy - and it's working. She can't really be described as an 'anti-Harley' - or at least, I wouldn't do so - because she really isn't any kind of a crazy clown; she just dresses like one.

Oh, gods - talk about missing the point of a character. I really don't understand these writers whose first instinct is 'what if they were evil all along' - the Alicia/Puppet Master dynamic works precisely because she's pure-heartedly good and he's conflictedly evil, and it has done so for decades. What's the point of turning her into yet another forgettable villain? You know she's going to be back to her old self in a year or two, anyway, and then writers are going to have to scramble to explain away her 'evil' phase.

Yeah, I like 'Long Halloween', but mainly for the non-character stuff. The artwork's cool, the plot is engaging, Holiday is actually a pretty cool villain, for a one-off - but the characters (at least, the non-original ones) are mainly just there for set-dressing and spectacle. I do think it added a few interesting things to the mythos, but it's still way overrated.