DC will release Harley Quinn Fartacular: Silent Butt Deadly #1 in April 2025.
Did you know that Marvel released a comic book called X-Men: Green where one of the characters murders a shopkeeper because a plastic bag bearing his shop's name suffocated a sea turtle? Yes, that's an actual comic that was released by the publisher, and it's one of many such strange stories and plot points that have become so commonplace in the modern publishing scene. Weird and degenerate, as well as an overall decline in quality across the board, has been the norm in comics for around a decade now.
In some ways it feels like all of that has come to a head with the impending release of the recently announced Harley Quinn Fartacular: Silent Butt Deadly one-shot coming to comic book shops in March of next year. DC shared covers and the following synopsis:
I’ve been holding in all my very worst bits of bubble guts for the last 32 years, and it’s all been leading up to this epic expulsion! Your nose will never be the same! You’ll gag, you’ll cry, you’ll feel things you ain’t never felt before! This fine publication is a celebration of all things passed, pre-scent, and toot-ure. Sequential art’s place in the annals of history is about to change with the release of the Harley Quinn Fartacular: Silent Butt Deadly, a comic that promises to have the highest concentration of gas per page (GPP) ever committed to print. Emphasis on committed, because everyone who worked on this comic is getting thrown into Dr. Fartley’s Home for No-Good Gassy Gals ’n’ Guys. Read the comic that Abraham Lincoln called “a joy from fart to finish” moments before he died!
WARNING: We aren’t kidding. If you are grossed out by farts, then this comic isn’t for you (and that’s perfectly okay!…though I am judging you!). Unless you want to put your feelings to the test…in which case this comic is for you.
Yes, this is an actual book being published by DC Comics, not a Tumblr post circa 2012. Written by Joanne Starrer, whose Fire & Ice: Welcome to Smallville was widely maligned by fans, has for some reason been given the go ahead to produce a thinly veiled fetish comic about Harley Quinn farting. Really, it's hard to look at the book any other way than that, regardless of how the solicit tries to spin things.
Now, lest ye think this is a moral panic sort of editorial, I don't care what people produce in terms of comic books and art. Censorship has no business near any creative endeavors. However, discretion is a thing, and the DC pantheon is both a venerable part of the comic book industry as well as a multimillion-dollar brand. On what planet does it make sense to produce a comic book like this featuring your second most popular female character? And that's to say nothing of the hypocrisy. In one breath we're supposed to excoriate William Moulton Marston for the bondage themes in his original Wonder Woman comics but in the next applaud comics where Harley Quinn is emitting green vapor from her anus on the front cover? How does that work? Answer: it doesn't.
Again, it's pretty disingenuous to pretend that this book is just being put out for giggles when the Internet exists and fans know there are entire online communities devoted to this exact sort of thing. And if that's your jam, good for you, but my objection is not to the existence of any particular kink, but rather finding it in a DC comic book and not a subreddit somewhere. I wouldn't be any happier to see Marvel publish Spider-Man: Peter Parker's Shibari Webtacular or Wolverine's Scratch and Sniff: Logan's Adventure at the Local Laundromat. See folks, it's just funny when Peter thwips MJ up into compromising positions from the ceiling, or Logan winds up facedown into a pile of women's underwear. It isn't anything naughty at all!
Yeah, right. While there have been some successes on the publishing front in recent months, including Absolute Batman from DC itself, this is a total slap in the face to fans who are, frankly, fed up with all of the garbage coming out of mainstream publishers. It's become a gaggle of incompetents who prop up anyone with a pulse on failed project after failed project. Meanwhile, creators like Jason Fabok, Geoff Johns, Bryan Hitch, Gary Frank, Francis Manapul, and other longtime DC stalwarts are off making their own indie books while "Fartacular" comics are coming from their former bosses.
Something has to give, but with the mindless so-called leadership in the industry today not seemingly going away anytime soon, who knows when that will be.