Paul Dini

Paul Dini wrote for Batman: The Animated Series through the early 1990s and, with the artist Bruce Timm, invented Harley Quinn for a single 1992 episode because the script needed someone to hand the Joker a cake. She outgrew the show and is now among the most recognisable characters DC owns. Dini won several Emmys for that work, wrote for Tiny Toon Adventures and Batman Beyond, and later scripted the Arkham video games. Black Canary and Zatanna: Bloodspell, drawn by Joe Quinones and published in 2014, sends the pair after a curse laid by a dying casino thief. His strangest book is Dark Night, a memoir about being badly beaten in 1993 and about what the characters he wrote did for him afterwards.