Neil Gaiman is one whimsical bastard, isn’t he?

This is the guy who wrote a comic about the personification of dream saving his ex-lover from hell after he cast her there to suffer hundreds of years of torment for rejecting him and yet we all still consider him the starry-eyed teddy bear of comics. He can come up with the darkest stories but paint it with just enough magic to make it compelling and even family-friendly; and that’s why he’s one of the greats. While I could review one of his more well-known comics, like one of the Sandman arcs, or some of his earlier DC stuff, like Violent Cases or Black Orchid, I think it would be neat to do a one-shot that doesn’t get enough attention.

Harlequin Valentine is a graphic novel published in 2001 by Dark Horse and illustrated by John Bolton. If you think that last name is familiar, that’s because he worked with Gaiman before in the first issue of Books of Magic but he’s done some other comics stuff in the past (more on that later). Anyways, this story would later be republished in a book called Fragile Things, because apparently one publication was not enough. It is a very short comic that doesn’t over-stay it’s welcome which is refreshing in an age of drawn-out arcs that only serve to bleed comic nerds’ wallets dry.

Before we get into the review proper, here’s some context.