Batman: The Long Halloween — The Last Halloween

“Batman:  The Long Halloween” and its follow-up “Dark Victory” are rightly regarded as classics within the character’s canon.  Both maxiseries from writer Jeph Loeb and artist Tim Sale told year-long stories set within the early days of The Dark Knight’s career as he worked to stop serial killers that were ripping apart Gotham’s underworld.  They also showed the bleakness and hope in his ongoing crusade as the city’s landscape changed from being one defined by gangsters to one defined by freaks.  If you haven’t read either, they’re well worth your time and are easy to pick up as they’ve been continuously kept in print by DC via new editions and reprints.

Though they also tell complete stories, Loeb and  Sale haven’t been averse to expanding on them.  “Catwoman:  When In Rome” followed a few years later and showed what the title character got up to during the events of “Dark Victory.”  That was it for a while until it was announced that Loeb and Sale would be returning to their story with “The Long Halloween Special” which was meant to set up a new miniseries from the both of them.  Unfortunately, Sale passed away not long after the publication of that issue and it looked like that was the last we’d be seeing of this project.

That we’re finally getting “The Last Halloween” is described by Loeb in the interview that follows it in this collection as a celebration of his most trusted artistic partner.  I can see that in how each issue is meant to be a showcase for the artist who did it, and most of them acquit themselves quite well.  While I don’t need to tell you that living legends like Klaus Janson and Bill Sienkiewicz still have it after all these years, it’s still great to see quality work from reliable pros like Eduardo Risso, Cliff Chiang, Becky Cloonan, and Chris Samnee.  Oh, and then there’s that opening chapter from Sale himself.

The opening issue shows the late artist in all of his impressionistic, stylized glory with a Batman who looms larger-than-life and a Two-Face that’s wretched while still managing some sympathy.  His noir stylings are also still impressive to behold as the Caped Crusader finds himself up against a vengeful Calendar Man who has raised a cult to deal with his fears of being forgotten in the wake of the Holiday Killings from the original series.  The Calendar Man knows exactly who to blame for this and he’s out to make Harvey Dent suffer, along with his wife Gilda.

This opening story works because it feels like a reasonable addition to the existing mythos of the previous maxiseries.  Calendar Man always felt like an obvious red herring in those series about holiday-themed killings, so it feels appropriate for him to finally get the spotlight here.  Gilda’s reappearance also makes a certain amount of sense in that it always felt like she was destined to return following “The Long Halloween,” and in a much more precarious mental state.  More than anything else is that while Sale easily sells the straightforward drama of Loeb’s script, he even makes some of its cuteness (the Halloween encounter with Commissioner Gordon’s family) and implausibilities (just how was Batman able to wear that full costume over his regular outfit) work as well.

Still, this was all good enough to give me hope that what followed would be worth reading after all.  Regular readers will know that I’ve  been skeptical of this miniseries not just because it represented a creator going back to one of their defining projects even though it didn’t need to be expanded on and its other creator had passed away.  The real issue is that Loeb’s reputation as a writer has taken a nosedive in the years since these original miniseries.  Sure his collaborations with Sale were generally well-regarded, but he’s also delivered two of the most reputedly dire stories in Marvel history – “Ultimates 3” and “Ultimatum” – with most of his other work for the publisher not being that much better.  There’s also the matter of his TV work with Marvel and otherwise not setting the world on fire either.

So when it was announced that we’d be getting “The Last Halloween” from Loeb, I was not optimistic about its quality.  Yet there was always the feeling that the writer wouldn’t return to the scene of some of his greatest triumphs without a real plan to tell a story expanding on it (along with a whole lot of morbid curiosity) that got me to pick up this collected edition and give it a read.  Now that I’ve actually read it, well… it’s not terrible, but it’s a deeply inessential addition to the previous series.

One of the reasons “The Long Halloween” and “Dark Victory” worked was because they were both satisfying whodunits at their core.  The first maxiseries was driven by the mystery of “Who was Holiday?” while the second had us speculating as to the mystery of the Hangman.  Both titles did a good job of introducing new suspects with each chapter while leading up to finales that delivered on the work that had come before – moreso in the sequel than the original.  They also took us through an earlier time in Gotham, back when Batman was still getting his start and Harvey Dent was still District Attorney, fleshing out that era quite well.  There were also the encounters with key figures from Batman’s rogues gallery each month which were satisfying in their classic interpretations of the characters.

“The Last Halloween” nods at all of these things, yet doesn’t do any of them particularly well.  There’s the re-emergence of a Holiday-style figure who’s going around and critically wounding prominent Bat-villains.  Yet there’s also lots of Falcone family drama involving Mario, the surviving son of Carmine, and Catwoman as well as a half-baked subplot involving Gilda Dent.  She plays a significant role here even though it’s hard to tell what her real purpose was in this story.  There’s a decent idea in that she’s blind to the villainy of Two-Face, and only sees Harvey in him, but it’s never paid off in the end where she’s shuffled off in what’s meant to feel like a moment of tragedy, but has no real impact.

That’s because the story itself feels like a series of moments that are staged as big, important events yet never actually come together in service of character or an ongoing narrative.  Two-Face gets shot and is at death’s door in the opening issue!  Jim Gordon’s son gets kidnapped!  Batman is shot and critically wounded by Mario Falcone!  The Joker has broken out of Arkham Asylum and has stolen all of the other Bat-villains’ stuff!  Something like this happens in each chapter and it quickly becomes more tiring than exciting.  You get the feeling that Loeb was worry that his audience would quickly lose interest if they didn’t have some big, exciting thing to fixate on from issue to issue.  As opposed to the more human story of a woman grieving the loss of her husband who has turned into something she just can’t comprehend.  None of this is helped by Loeb’s nitpicks at superhero convention with people wondering if Batman is the reason Gotham is now overrun with freaks and the ongoing not-mystery of why a couple characters think he’s on the wrong side.

I guess the reason I didn’t think “The Last Halloween” was terrible was because there wasn’t anything offensively bad about it.  The story it tells is a mess that barely holds together, but this is the forgettable kind of bad that people will likely flush down the memory hole in a year or two.  That’s a disservice to the many artists who turned in good work trying to elevate what they were given, as well as what now stands as Sale’s final published work.  If you like good superhero art of the “Batman” variety, then this collection has a lot of it.  What it doesn’t have is a quality story that, outside of its opening chapter, doesn’t live up in any way to the classic ones that came before it.  Go read those again and leave this one on the shelf.