Day 89

Day 89 of the #365drawingchallenge continues Batman Week with a request for Mistah J’s main squeeze, Harley Quinn. “Oh, come on, Puddin’! Don’t you wanna rev up your Harley? Vroom vroom!” Classic dirty line from a kid’s show that none of us caught at the time.

I actually had multiple requests to draw her. I’m not surprised, she’s been the “it girl” of the comic scene for awhile now. Especially after that Suicide Squad movie came out. Of course now they want the booty shorts hyper sexualized version of the character. I don’t know which version people were requesting from me, but I decided to stick with original version. I’m pretty sure I would have gotten more attention with the more fan service pinup girl, but that’s really not my things.

There’s a lot of artists out there that enjoy drawing women purely as sex objects, Frank Cho has made a whole career of it. It’s not for me. I don’t want to draw for people with fetishes to get off. It’s not my style. If it came up in a story or was central to a character (like Poison Ivy who uses seduction as a weapon) I would have no problem drawing it, but I don’t want to draw it just for the sake of getting attention. If that’s what you’re looking for there is a plethora of it out there. Just visit DeviantArt. I’m not a prude, if that’s what you want to draw or look at good for you.

I don’t have many artists in my family. I have a cousin that designed the art for arcade cabinets in the 80s and 90s, and did the box art and instruction booklet art for video games. So that’s pretty rad. The only other real artist to speak of is my uncle that I don’t know very well because he has been in jail for most of my life. He likes to spend a lot of his time in jail drawing beautiful, often sexual women, and he’s really good at it. No doubt this is a way to cope with the fact that he doesn’t get to see women much anymore and is a bit of a replacement. So maybe that has shaded my view on the whole thing.

Now a confession, I find Harley Quinn pretty damn annoying. Much like how everyone loves Deadpool and I can’t really stand him, everyone loves Harley while I find her grating. She’s a decent companion to the Joker and adds something to his presentation, but on her own I don’t think she holds up all that well. A lot of it is the way she speaks. It just gets on my nerves. I do like her very childish nature, thus my drawing, and how quickly she can snap and show how dark she really is. So I don’t hate her, I just don’t love her like everyone else seems to.