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Harley Quinn, Just the Nice, Fun-Loving Psycho Next Door

Margot Robbie as Harley Quinn in the film “Suicide Squad.”Credit...Clay Enos/Warner Bros. and DC Comics

The world of superhero comics is filled with tortured souls. One guy, grief-stricken after the vicious murder of his parents, dresses up as a bat to fight crime. Another similarly grief-stricken fellow dresses up as a spider. And those are the heroes.

Even in that world, the psychological profile of Harley Quinn stands out. Best known as the former girlfriend of the Joker, Harley suffers from multiple personalities, homicidal tendencies, Stockholm syndrome and possibly “shared psychotic disorder.” A survivor of domestic violence (not surprising, given her former beau), she has murdered grown-ups and kids. Her weapons of choice include mallets, baseball bats and exploding cupcakes.

Despite her mental issues and misdeeds (or perhaps because of them), Harley is having a moment. This year, she headlined three books, including a self-titled monthly comic and two six-issue mini-series. She’s a lead character on “DC Super Hero Girls,” an animated web series, and can be seen in the new video game Batman: Arkham Underworld (one of more than a dozen games she has appeared in since 1994). And then there’s the new Warner Bros. film “Suicide Squad.” Based on a comic series about a top-secret team of incarcerated supervillains, the film stars Margot Robbie as Harley in the character’s first live-action feature-film appearance.

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Harley Quinn and the Joker.Credit...DC Entertainment

How did Harley become one of the most popular female characters in the DC Universe? In part, by cleaning up her act, or what passes for clean in her world. In several incarnations — most notably, her foray into video games — Harley has been a true supervillain, maiming and killing with unbridled glee. Now she’s more of an antihero, as in “Suicide Squad,” where she and a team of bad guys take on even worse guys in “Dirty Dozen”-style missions. In “DC Super Hero Girls,” which is aimed at a tween audience, she’s even tamer. Harley is actually one of the good guys, sharing a dorm room with her pal Wonder Woman at a very exclusive high school (only teen superheroes allowed).

Her rise is all the more intriguing when you factor in her love life. As the Joker’s girlfriend, she was the prototypical victim, enduring beatings, murder attempts and the most sadistic sorts of mind games — and always coming back for more. Then there’s her long-running relationship with her fellow supervillain Poison Ivy. The long hugs, the sleepovers, the soulful stares? Even Batgirl put two and two together. Last year, DC’s official Twitter account confirmed that Harley and Ivy were indeed girlfriends, albeit “without the jealousy of monogamy.”

As an abuse survivor and free agent, Harley has become something of a feminist icon — magazines like Bust have praised her complexity, smarts and subversive sexuality — even as she revels in her own bouts of sadistic fun.

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A Harley Quinn comic book.Credit...Amanda Conner/DC Entertainment

When the writer Paul Dini and the artist Bruce Timm first introduced the character in 1992 in an episode of “Batman: The Animated Series,” it was a small role, the lone female among the Joker’s motley crew of henchmen. The twist: Unlike the others, Harley clearly had a thing for her boss. It was strictly a one-off. “We didn’t want to give Joker a girlfriend because it humanizes him,” Mr. Timm said, “and we were really trying to stress how bizarre and creepy he could be.”

But Harley clearly had something. Between Mr. Timm’s striking take on the classic harlequin costume — he ditched the “frills and spangles” of the commedia dell’arte original for a skintight bodysuit of alternating blacks and reds — and the voice actress Arleen Sorkin’s over-the-top reads (a singsongy Brooklyn accent that could, in a split-second, jump from pure sugar to nuts), Harley became an instant hit.

Two years later, her creators finally got around to revealing her origin in the single-issue comic The Batman Adventures: Mad Love. Née Harleen Frances Quinzel, Harley was working in Gotham City’s infamous Arkham Asylum as a psychiatrist when she met and fell in love with one of her patients: the Joker. The comic won an Eisner (the industry’s equivalent of an Oscar) for best single story and explored the bizarre love triangle between the Joker (obsessed with Batman, but hot and cold about Harley); Batman (thinks about the Joker a lot, but maybe not obsessively); and Harley (loves the Joker and sees Batman as a rival for his attention).

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Harley Quinn with Poison Ivy.Credit...DC Entertainment

“Harley’s point of view is very pragmatic,” Mr. Dini said. “She’s like, ‘Why don’t you just shoot the guy?’ But the Joker can’t just shoot him: He has to triumph over him.”

Over the next several years, Harley got her own solo comic book, starred in the short-lived 2002 TV series “Birds of Prey” and played a major role in the critically acclaimed 2009 video game Batman: Arkham Asylum, which sold 2.5 million units within weeks of its release. Tara Strong (“Teen Titans,” “The Powerpuff Girls”) has voiced Harley in several animated series and video games and considers her one of her favorite characters. “In general, video games are the most taxing on a voice actor’s instrument, because you’re constantly screaming and doing death sounds and kicking noises,” Ms. Strong said. “It can make you cranky. But I never get cranky when it’s time for Harley. I don’t care if I have to do a thousand death noises.”

But as the video game Harley got darker and meaner and her comic book artists traded in her red-and-black cat suit for corsets, short shorts and pigtails, longtime fans balked at what they saw as the hypersexualization of a character who, unlike other DC heroines, was never really about that. The fourth incarnation of the comic series Suicide Squad, which featured a more bare, more murderous Harley, was canceled. “When they first started messing with her, with the fishnets and the really extreme makeup and the nasty hairstyles, I was frankly put off by it,” Mr. Timm said.

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Suicide Squad comic book.Credit...Jim Lee/DC Entertainment

Harley’s redemption began with the 2013 start of the comic series Harley Quinn, written by Amanda Conner and Jimmy Palmiotti. For the husband-and-wife team, the emphasis was on fun. Finally away from her no-account boyfriend, Harley swaps grim Gotham for the joys of Coney Island, and her day job as a sociopath-murderer for more dignified work as a landlady, member of a roller-derby team and part-time shrink. She hasn’t stopped killing people, not completely, but there’s notably less of it (a recent roller-derby match involved decapitations and poison gas).

Whatever your preference in Harleys — classic 1990s jester or this year’s Margot Robbie — someone somewhere is dressing up as her, from cosplay events to comic conventions. “I just did a show in France a couple months ago,” Mr. Timm said, “and even in France, there are more Harley cosplayers than any other character. There are people who dress up as her as a psychiatrist, before she even became Harley Quinn.”

In “Suicide Squad,” Ms. Robbie sports several outfits and looks during the course of the story. “One of my complaints with these movies is that everyone always wears the exact same thing,” said David Ayer, the movie’s director. Even so, the biggest criticism he still hears from fans is: Why isn’t Harley in her original jester outfit? “You know, I tried,” he said. “There is this sort of a flashback where she appears in it. We tried different things, but it was the more punk-rock aesthetic that worked for the character.”

Harley is much more than the sum of her costumes, anyway. “I’ve got daughters,” Mr. Ayer said, “and I think they connect with her freedom to be whatever and whoever she wants to be.”

For Ms. Strong, there’s something even more primal going on. “Sometimes you want to crack someone’s skull in, but you can’t, because that’s illegal,” she said. “People love Harley so much because she lets her crazy out.”

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section AR, Page 12 of the New York edition with the headline: Just the Nice, Fun-Loving Psycho Next Door. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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