5 Ways DC’s Cartoon Sitcoms Are Doing Adult Animation Right
When Harley Quinn’s Poison Ivy (voice of Lake Bell) finally ended up partnered in both supervillainy and love with the titular Harley (Kaley Cuoco), fans rejoiced. Showrunners Justin Halpern and Patrick Schumacker promised the couple will never break up. Harley and Ivy started their fourth season last summer as current TV’s longest-running queer couple. There was, however, one person their new love left behind: Ivy’s former fiancé Chuck Brown, better known as Kite Man. In fact, Ivy might have never been brave enough to pursue a life with Harley without Kite Man’s intervention. He was the only one at his wedding willing to acknowledge that Ivy didn’t actually love him and, during their vows, answered the officiant’s prompt with a “Hell… no.”
We don’t need to spend too much time feeling bad for Kite Man, though. At the Villy Awards in the third season of Harley Quinn, we learn he’s found romance again with Golden Glider (then voiced by Cathy Ang). The subsequent Valentine’s Day special makes sure to show them still coupled up. And starting today, the two fly into their own spin-off: in Max’s Kite Man: Hell Yeah!, which finds them navigating life, love and small-business ownership together.
If the thought of yet another superhero-themed adult animation show fills you with exhaustion and dread, I get it. But Kite Man: Hell Yeah! is, like Harley Quinn before it, a truly ludicrous joy. Here are five reasons to take a flyer on it.
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Warning: Contains spoilers for the first four seasons of Harley Quinn.
Its World-Building Doesn’t Require the Viewer to Do Any Homework
The current cultural dominance of superhero media has had countless negative effects, from risk aversion at studios for productions that aren’t based on existing IP to preposterous levels of praise inflation for otherwise unremarkable scenes that only seem ambitious because they’re taking place in a world where characters can fly and shoot lasers from their eyes. One of the less important but more annoying effects stems from these movies and shows featuring characters with often daunting amounts of lore. In some instances, superheroes and -villains were first introduced close to a century ago, and have years’ if not decades’ worth of interconnections with other characters in the extended comic universe — hence the proliferation of explainers like this. I’m old enough to remember when all the information you needed to understand a movie or show actually made it into the final cut; those aren’t the times we’re living in now.
But Harley Quinn and Kite Man: Hell Yeah! allow the viewer to jump in and enjoy them without knowing deep comic book mythos. Harley kicks off by showing us her relationship with one of Batman’s most notorious nemeses, Joker (Alan Tudyk), and what finally makes her end it. Harley then starts assembling a coterie of weirdo sidekicks who are probably pretty far down the list of characters who could cross from comic books into a DC movie — Doctor Psycho (Tony Hale), King Shark (Ron Funches), Frank The Plant (J.B. Smoove) and Sy Borgman (Jason Alexander). I honestly don’t know if any or all of those even predate the show because it doesn’t matter. When Kite Man is introduced later in the run, it’s clear that he’s a crappy villain no one takes seriously, and that’s really all you need to know.
The same goes for the secondary characters in Kite Man. Everything we need to know about, for instance, seen-it-all bar owner Noonan (Jonathan Banks) is revealed organically through episode plot lines. Other comic-book adaptations can be excessively insular; Harley and Kite Man seem to want as many viewers as possible to have a goofy good time with them; gatekeeping isn’t part of the mission.
It Has a Nuanced Vision of Supervillainy
Superhero universes often feature supposed villains whose “evil” plans are basically antisocial, but who also kind of have a point. Black Panther’s Killmonger is driven to correct the ills of colonization; X-Men’s Magneto formed his notions of justice and retribution as a child, when he was imprisoned in Auschwitz.
Harley and Kite Man mostly keep it light (Harley’s backstory does involve mental coercion by Joker), but they also blur the line between good guy and bad guy. Harley and Ivy determine that they’re not evil enough to join the Legion of Doom, instead turning their chaotic impulses to fighting truly dangerous criminals, not mere thieves/eco-terrorists like themselves. Not only that: they also mentor Kite Man and Golden Glider (voiced in the new show by Stephanie Hsu), advising them that instead of banks, they can just rob bigger baddies who actually deserve it. Unfortunately for Gotham City, there are plenty of those; as the season goes on, Kite Man and Golden Glider have to push their cartoon-comedy-level powers to their limits in order to disrupt feature-film-level evil schemes. The Harley Quinn offshoot of the DC Comic franchise: where slapstick meets genocide.
Its Voice Actors Are Perfectly Cast
Clearly, shows like Marvel’s What If…? or X-Men ’97 have very different artistic goals than Harley and Kite Man. Hence, the Marvel shows have brought back the voice talent you know, as much as they’re able, to create continuity with the larger comic book universe and make sure you take the animated shows just as seriously as you do the live-action shows and movies, even if the better choice might be to cast an American as Doctor Strange rather than subject us to more of English actor Benedict Cumberbatch’s crunchy American accent.
Harley and Kite Man don’t need you to take them seriously: They need you to laugh, which is why they’ve cast funny actors to play their characters. James Wolk or Diedrich Bader would probably never make it into Zack Snyder movies as Superman or Batman, but they’re great performing those characters in adult cartoons. As Darkseid, Keith David is funnier than he’s been since Enlisted; multiple Emmy and Tony winner Judith Light makes Helen Villigan, a billionaire retailer completely bereft of business ethics, truly chilling; and while Lex Luthor and Queen of Fables have both been recast from Harley (the late Lance Reddick replacing Giancarlo Esposito in the former role; Abbott Elementary’s Janelle James for Wanda Sykes in the latter), if James Adomian had not returned as Bane, I would have had to start a riot.
It Knows Its Sitcom Subgenres Well Enough to Goof on Them
Kite Man: Hell Yeah! was originally titled Noonan’s, after the villains’ dive bar Kite Man and Golden Glider buy in the series premiere; earlier this month, executive producer Dean Lorey called Kite Man “Cheers with villains.” This should not lead viewers to expect a 1:1 spoof: rather, Kite Man does its own take on the setting, showing how the bar staffers and regulars establish their rapport and the importance this particular third place has in their lives.
But it’s not just a hangout comedy: Kite Man is also a romcom — one in which very common relationship issues (when’s the right time to move in?) play out in a world where good and evil are constantly battling (Golden Glider discussing the question with her girls at the spa gets interrupted when the aestheticians all turn out to be assassins). In this respect, Kite Man takes after its TV progenitor, in which Harley and Ivy have had to tackle issues ranging from saving a partner from a zombie attack to getting past a revelation about past romantic partners. What would New Girl be like if Jess routinely attacked henchmen with a large mallet and Nick was constantly trying to elevate his status among his villainous peers? Probably a lot like Harley Quinn and Kite Man: Hell Yeah!.
Nothing Is More Important Than Being Funny!
Lots of superhero/supervillain narratives incorporate their own takes on time travel. I’m fairly sure Kite Man is the only one I’ve seen in which the mechanism that sends characters into other eras is a supernatural bathroom fixture. Even some of its villains’ plots are less evil than petty, as when Lex captures a supremely powerful MacGuffin device, then sits on it for weeks because he’s waiting to deploy it on Superman’s birthday. Queen of Fables searching for a new body; Noonan gradually revealing that he’s more of a badass than most of his supposedly supervillainous regulars; Bane’s dalliances in both male modeling and fatherhood — all demented and delightful.
Though I’m personally having a hard time getting excited for WandaVision’s forthcoming spinoff Agatha All Along, I’d love Harley Quinn to spawn another 10 series of cartoon chaos.
