Interview: Erica Henderson talks Harley and Ivy: Life and Crimes

Erica Henderson is the Eisner Award-winning comic artist and writer known for her work on The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl, Jughead, Dracula, Motherf**ker, Assassin Nation, and Danger and Other Unknown Risks. In her newest comic, Harley and Ivy: Life and Crimes, Henderson writes and draws a Harley Quinn and Poison Ivy story showcasing their relationship from its very beginnings.

We spoke to Henderson about the series. Check out our full conversation below:

How did this book come to be? I know you've done a few Harley Quinn stories for DC. Did you always have something in the back of your mind for Harley and Ivy?

I didn't, actually. This story is sort of filling in the gap in their relationship, or rather, how the relationship started, because it was one of those things that was hinted at for so long, and then it was finally allowed to be, and it just happened.

So I definitely didn't have anything like this in mind, because I didn't realize that no one had written this story. I'd been doing more and more Harley stuff with Arianna Turturro, and she asked if I wanted to do Harley and Ivy. It was mainly because she's editing a Harley book and an Ivy book, and you don't really want them to mix too much in the individual book, because then it turns into a team book, and that's a different thing. And so she was like, I would like a book that's about the two of them, and then we just sort of talked about it forever.

Despite Ivy and Harley being a major DC relationship now, it's still fairly new in the grand scheme of continuity. What part of their relationship are you particularly drawn to, and how fun is it to navigate through their earliest DC relationship in the story?

I think what's fun for me is that it's one of these things where they've been implied to be a couple since almost a year or two after Harley's inception, right? They were doing that in the cartoon, and so it's this thing that people have just kind of accepted, like, yeah, they're together, but if you kind of write down what these two characters are about, you wouldn't expect them to be together, right? You've got someone who's hyper-focused on one thing, kind of a misanthrope, very much driven to one goal, and then someone who's incredibly ADHD, but also, I can't imagine, even if you were healthy, living with a therapist would be great, but if you don't want to deal with your issues at all, that's also going to be a problem as well, and so I think it's kind of fun sitting down.

Even before I wrote the pitch for this story, I wrote a document that was like, “This is how I view these two characters and this is how I think they work together, and the ways that the relationship works, and also doesn't work,” right? Because relationships are not perfect. There's going to be friction, and I started with that, and I think that's the interesting part, because as a story, we know where this winds up, right?

We know they wind up together. That's not a mystery, and so we have to think about the journey and how them getting together is interesting. So yeah, I'm focused on that part, where very different people get together, and how that mixes.

How important do you think it is to keep this couple together?

Yeah, I mean, I don't see any reason, since it has only been official for a short amount of time, I don't see any reason to shake that up. Plus, you know, since I'm going back in time, it's going to be hard for me to do things that change the status quo, unless I immediately unchanged them. So I'm not even thinking about them not being together, except at the beginning, when they're not.

That's where we start. So I'm only thinking about it in those terms.

What was it like to revisit the Joker-Harley relationship? Thankfully, that's something that’s long been left behind, but remains essential in a story like this.

Yeah, I was happy to revisit it, just because I feel like Mad Love was a pretty formative comic story for me. It's a pretty adult story and Batman: The Animated Series spinoff comic. And so I actually don't mind going back to that.

Also, because it lets us start with like, well, this is bad. So let's move on from it. You know, like, it's nice having something where you can hold up a mirror and say, well, we don't want to do that again. And just remind people like where we came from, which was this like, really incredibly abusive relationship.

Do you feel any pressure in sharing and revealing these early Ivy/Harley moments that fans have been waiting to see?

I feel like thinking too much about what other people want is not the way to go about things in this industry. You cannot make everyone happy. As long as you're making yourself happy, enough people will hopefully fall within the same range, and they'll be okay with it.

But yeah, like, there's just no way. You know, you just can't, there's got to be so many different versions of how this came about that, like, yeah, I can't think about that.

Did you speak to anyone else who has written Harley and Ivy before when preparing for this book?

Not really. You know, I read a lot of stuff. Basically, as soon as I started, I was given so many PDFs to read… going even all the way back to like Ivy's first appearance, there were notes that were like, this probably isn't relevant, but it's fun. So we're putting this in here too. There was a lot of “No Man's Land” in there because that's where Harley and Ivy first meet in the comics. And then yeah, there was a bit of Suicide Squad with like the Joker stuff. And then all of that [Jimmy] Palmiotti run and all of like the G. Willow Wilson, Poison Ivy stuff.

Where do you fall on the idea of Ivy and Harley being villains/antiheroes?

I fall more in line with the current status quo, which is like, she's doing the right thing, even if there's a lot of her killing people, too. She's trying to do the right thing in terms of the greater good, but is also kind of a mess and is still a criminal, because a lot of times those actions for the greater good are not legal.

For Harley, I see her more kind of in like, chaotic neutral, I guess. That's where I prefer to see her. Obviously, there are plenty of stories where she's like, I don't know, blown up a bus or something. And that's not great. But if we're talking about headcanon, I see her more in the chaotic neutral, like she's doing crimes, but she's not setting out to be terrible, even if she winds up doing bad things.

What can you say about Ma Hunkel appearing in the book - how did you land on that decision?

I just wanted to do Ma Hunkel. And I was like, ‘let's make this happen.’

I have outlined the first 12 issues. And yeah, I could just immediately have her in the next story arc after this first one.

How exciting is it to see the book finally arrive in readers' hands?

Yeah, it's pretty cool.

The wildest part for me was getting the lettering back. And just having one section, be like, by Erica Henderson, it's just one name. And I was like, Oh my god, that's crazy. You know, like, you don't see that too often. So that was kind of the most exciting part was seeing that very officially written down.

Harley and Ivy: Life and Crimes #1 is in comic book stores now!