Love is a many-splendored thing. Until it isn’t. DC Comics boasts some of the most romantic superhero couples in all of comic books: Clark Kent and Lois Lane are best friends and committed partners, Dinah Lance and Oliver Queen are swashbuckling lovers, and even Batman and Catwoman have found their own kind of happiness, albeit one that allows them to lead very separate lives. But for every awe-inspiring relationship, there is an equally dysfunctional one, and in the world of DC, dysfunction can be literally explosive.
For years, Joker and Harley Quinn took the title as DC’s most twisted twosome, but the pair are definitively broken up, with Harley now acknowledged as an outright DC hero and more often paired with Poison Ivy. That begs the question... who is DC's new worst couple?
The first contenders are Arsenal and Cheshire. The recovering heroin-addict hero and evil mercenary met while Arsenal was undercover for the government and later had a baby together, which Cheshire promptly abandoned. Unlike Catwoman, Cheshire’s relationship with a superhero didn’t make her a better person. The two would reconnect periodically until Arsenal’s passing in Heroes in Crisis, but Cheshire was a truly diabolical villain, compromising Arsenal's ethics whenever she was around.
Cheshire also sticks around for her relationship with Catman, another situation that led to an abandoned child. After a transformative sojourn in Africa, Catman returned as a villainous equal to Batman, and his relationship with Cheshire - in which she poisoned him, killed many people, and sold him out to other villains - compromised his found family, leading to him attempting to kill his friends in the Secret Six storyline "Cat's Cradle" by Gail Simone and various artists. Catman was struggling with his morality at the time, and Cheshire's influence pushed him over the edge into true darkness - a fall he hasn't really been able to reverse.
It's hard to talk about bad influences without mentioning John Constantine. Constantine and Zatanna Zatara met while working together under the famed mage Nick Necro, who Zatanna was also dating at the time. When Necro became obsessed with finding the legendary Book of Magic, John and Zatanna fell in love behind his back. As with most couples that start out cheating, things soured quickly. By Justice League Dark #12, Constantine had broken up with Zatanna and set her dad’s ghost on fire. Zatanna is one of the most powerful heroes in the DC Universe, and yet whenever John is around, she finds her morals getting murky and her plans falling to pieces.
Honorable mentions also go to the Atom and Jean Loring - a relationship that ended with Jean staging murders to reconnect the pair - and Punch and Jewelee; a criminal pair who commit crimes while reciting lovey-dovey dialogue. All of these couples have made each other worse people, but none yet compare to Harley and Joker. For that, readers should look no further than Joker and his new henchwoman, Punchline!
While the Joker has been around since Batman #1 in 1940, Alexis Kaye, aka Punchline, was created by James Tynion IV and Jorge Jiménez for Batman #89 in April 2020. What makes this relationship even worse than Joker and Harley’s is that Punchline joined the Joker at a point in which he was stepping up his criminal efforts, becoming a worldwide movement, making the stakes and consequences of their dysfunction that much more serious. Harley was ultimately able to see the truth behind the Joker and put some distance between her and Puddin', but Joker is now closer to a terrorist movement than a bank robber, and Punchline has invested everything she has in being by his side. Sadly, it will take something drastic to save the Clown Prince of Crown's new beau from the misery he caused Harleen.