It took over a decade, two Crises, a Countdown and a Flashpoint leading to a New 52, but Harley got herself a second chance at an ongoing series. Amanda Conner and Jimmy Palmiotti worked as the writing team, with Chad Hardin (who I'd first encountered as an artist on some of those Bloodrayne comics I bought years earlier) initially as the primary artist, though the book had frequent other artists because DC seemed to take a page from how Marvel handled Deadpool and started shipping a crapload of Harley Quinn mini-series, one-shots, annuals and whatnot on top of this book. Sometimes Hardin would draw those instead, or this title would double-ship, so there had to be guest artists.
Through the first 2 years of the New 52, Harley had been mostly an unambiguous villain, commtiting such crimes as distributing handheld gaming systems packed with explosives through Gotham, then setting them off, killing dozens or hundreds. Conner and Palmiotti backed the hell away from all that as fast as they could, setting the character more firmly in a morally grey, anti-hero space. Harley would still commit violent acts, but typically in self-defense or against people who could be said to deserve it (if not quite to the extent she dished out.)
It also, at least for the 17 issues I bought before dropping the book, felt like Conner and Palmiotti couldn't decide what they wanted Harley to be doing, as they kept introducing new settings or jobs, then seemingly dropping them to move to the next idea almost right off. She inherits a building in Coney Island, which gives her the difficulty of being a landlord and potential plotlines involving her tenants. But they also had Harley join a roller derby team, then almost immediately abandon that in favor of a roller derby-themed underground fight club, which also sometimes working as a psychiatrist at a nursing home. By the time I dropped the book, she'd even started a gang of Harleys, for reasons that escape me.
There was strong streak of absurdist, referential humor. Harley frees a bunch of animals from a testing lab, but all their waste is stinking up the joint. So one of her tenants builds a giant catapult and the first launch hits DC's offices with dog shit. She keeps a stuffed, half-burned beaver around that she hallucinates talking to her. Harley faces a string of hitmen trying to collect a huge bounty, and finds out she put the bounty on herself in her sleep. She teams up with an old Cold War cyborg super-spy (who made it into her animated series) she met at the nursing home.
Hardin's work was a little stiff early on, but as time went by, he
loosened up his linework. With the comic (sometimes darkly comic, but
still comic) tone of the book, being willing to exaggerate his art
better fit the book. I didn't laugh out loud much while reading it - Conner and Palmiotti's sense of humor doesn't quite work for me somehow - but there were parts here and there that worked. Mostly, I wanted the book to just settle on a status quo and run with it for more than two issues. Pick a few supporting cast members to really focus on rather than just constantly throwing more, more, more at the wall.
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