On the first day of Comic-Con, the effects of the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes are clearly visible in the panels that didn’t get canceled. At the Max animation panel, the stars and writers behind Harley Quinn were notably absent. Instead, the husband-and-wife directing team, Ian Hamilton and Cecilla Aranovich Hamilton, were on hand to drop some very enticing new info about the upcoming fourth season.
In the Harley Quinn Season 3 finale, The Joker had Bruce Wayne arrested for tax fraud. When Wayne accepted his fate, Harley stepped up as the newest member of the Batfamily. At the same time, Poison Ivy was offered the chance to lead the Legion of Doom, which potentially spells conflict for the couple at the heart of the show.
“I think you’re aware that Harley is joining the Batfamily,” said Cecilla Aranovich Hamilton. “Harley is going to be on the side of right and justice, and now Ivy is the new CEO of the Legion of Doom. Now you have the opposite sides of the balance… So I think the most interesting thing this season is to see them navigate through that. They have to compromise. They’re trying to balance their professional life with their personal life and kind of playing [with] that dynamic the whole season.”
Hamilton later added that Harley’s inclusion will give her a new professional relationship to explore.
“Since Bruce Wayne was sent to jail, Alfred has no purpose,” added Hamilton. “He finds himself in the Wayne mansion doing nothing. When Harley comes in, he has a new purpose. He’s gonna teach Harley how to be a hero.”
But don’t expect Alfred’s lessons to fundamentally change Harley.
“Harley Quinn is Harley Quinn,” said Ian Hamilton. “She can put on a different costume. She can hang out with a different crew.But she’s gonna smash things with her bat, and that’s just the way things are gonna be.”
Cecilla Aranovich Hamilton also shared some insight into designing Harley’s new heroic costume, which she picks up while working with her new team.
“It was tricky because Harley’s regular outfit is pretty revealing,” recalled Hamilton. “There’s not a lot of coverage. So you think that when she’s joining the Batfamily, her costume will be a little more structured. It will have more coverage and not show as much skin. But at the same time you want to make it fun, and you want to personalize it to Harley a little bit. So we put in the Harley colors, pink and blue and some cut outs. So it’s conservative, but not super conservative. It was funny because the costume went through so many versions and it was one of the things we got the most notes on.”
Amusingly, Hamilton revealed that another member of the Batfamily had a redesign for a completely different reason.
“You know how Nightwing in the comics has a phenomenal ass? That actually becomes a plot point this season,” noted Hamilton. “With Nightwing’s specific [character] model, we had to modify our model from season 3 because his ass was flat. So we definitely had to add some ‘plump.’”
As for Ivy, Hamilton set the stage for some of the challenges awaiting her in the Legion of Doom.
“When Ivy gets there, she thinks she’s going to shake things up, she thinks she’s going to go for this new brand of socially conscious evil,” said Hamilton. “And then she finds the wall. She finds pushback from the older members of the LOD, the old guard, like Metallo and Man-bat, then we have Snowflame… [who] gets his powers from snorting coke. I didn’t make this up. It’s a real character. Look it up. It’s real, and he’s hilarious. He’s one of my favorite new characters this season.”
But there’s at least one new addition that Ivy is happy to see.
“This season, we introduce Talia al Ghul,” said Hamilton. “She’s kind of this new evil lady, and Ivy comes to see her as a role model. She’s really impressed, so Ivy develops a little bit of a fangirl crush.”
Hamilton added that Lex Luthor will have more development this season, and a fanboy crush of his own.
“In this season, we’re gonna go to the moon,” added Hamilton. “Lex has an evil convention up there on the moon. So we’re gonna see aliens, and extraterrestrial villains. And one of them is Steppenwolf. He’s going to make an appearance at this convention. And it’s fun to see the relationship between him and Lex because Lex is definitely starstruck with Steppenwolf and all about him.”
Although Harley’s crew has disbanded, the Hamiltons revealed that King Shark will resurface as a member of the IT department in the Legion of Doom. They also hinted that this season will feature King Shark as a family man outside of his day job. They also indicated that Supergirl will appear this season.
Harley Quinn Season 4 will premiere on July 27 on Max, but it wasn’t the only thing previewed at the Max Animation panel. The first presentation was for the Adventure Time spinoff, Adventure Time: Fionna and Cake, and in an early preview scene, the titular duo were trapped in a very ordinary world where Fionna had to work a day job and Cake was simply an ordinary cat who can’t speak English.
Another preview scene caught up with Simon, the now-cured Ice King, who is having trouble adjusting to life in the Land of Ooo. Finn made a cameo in this scene, but at some point, Simon will reunite with Fiona and Cake for the rest of this ten-episode series. Adventure Time: Fiona and Cake will premiere on Max on Thursday, August 31.
The remaining preview spotlight fell on Young Love, the animated spinoff from Hair Love, an Oscar-winning animated short. Within the original short, a six-year-old girl named Zuri wanted her father, Stephen, to help her with her hair when they went to visit her mother, Angela, in the hospital. In the first clip from Young Love, Angela is in recovery, but Zuri was frustrated by the little girl haircut that her mother gave her. So she once again had to turn to her father for help.
Young Love will premiere on Max this fall.
