Get into comics… The Cash Money Way! Part 4: Batman: The Long Halloween
GOTHAM CITY - A dark night in a city that keeps its secrets.
But one man is still trying to find the answers to life’s persistent questions…
Guy No- wait, no. Cash Money!
I love me a good mystery and I love it even more when it’s 90% shadows and fedoras. A femme fatale, a dangling cigarette, and some chopper-wielding gunsels hanging off the running-boards and I’m raring to go.
Let’s take any of your classic flat-foot sleuths, replace his trench-coat with a black cape and change his Stetson into a cowl and you get this week’s feature:
Written by Jeff “The Guy Who Writes Heroes” Loeb
Illustrated by Tim “Cash’s Favorite Comics Guy” Sale
Within the DC Universe, Batman is known as The World’s Greatest Detective (sorry, Sherlock). However, most times he is too busy brooding on a rain-soaked precipice to be doing any real detective work. That is not the case in The Long Halloween, a work that solidified - once and for all- Loeb & Sale as one of the indomitable comicbook teams of all time thanks to Loeb’s punchy Bat-interior-monologue and Sale’s stylized art.
Collecting the original 13 issue run of the 1996 series, Long Halloween is a Raymond Candleresque tale that takes place a year or two into Batman’s career. The Batman is still an urban myth, his Rogues’ Gallery is still putting the finishing touches on their garish costumes, and the mob still has Gotham in its steely grip. To this end, Long Halloween borrows steals wholesale from The Godfather series as the Falcone’s and Maroni’s grapple for power. Without warning, key mobsters begin turning up dead on major holidays. At the same time, Jim “As Yet To Be Commissioner” Gordon and crusading D.A. Harvey Dent make an uneasy alliance with The Batman to begin taking down the two crime families once and for all.
Sound familiar?
It’s probably because Batman Begins and The Dark Knight borrowed stole wholesale from Long Halloween. As the plot progresses and more mobsters on both sides of family feud die, Batman collects clues, puzzles over evidence and begins to realize the antics of The Holiday Killer and his alliance with Gordon and Dent may be connected in more ways than he originally suspected. Friendship and trust are called into question and we begin to see that Harvey Dent’s descent into being the classic Batman baddie, Two-Face, was a much more gradual a progression than a simple dash of acid in the face.
Batman runs along side the plot, trying desperately to put together the pieces, assuming the role of hardboiled gumshoe. I prefer this stubbly thinking-man Batman more than the guy who routinely punches Superman or, say, goes mano-a-batto with Darkseid, dies, and them comes back. And then dies. And then… wait… maybe not dies. [eyeroll]
Whodunnit? Who’s next? And at what cost? Long Halloween bites down and won’t let go until the very last.
Long Halloween was originally inspired when Loeb & Sale teamed to create three moody Halloween specials for Batman, which are collected in the aptly named, ”Batman: Legends of the Dark Knight Halloween Specials.” These stories don’t act so much as prequel (that job would probably be better served by Frank Miller & David Mazzucchelli’s Batman: Year One) more as introductions to the dark atmospheric ambiance that is Sale’s vision of Gotham after dark. Long Halloween has an equally fine sequel series collected in “Batman: Dark Victory” which depicts how the Rogues’ Gallery came to supplant Gotham’s native mafia population and how Batman came to have a brightly-dressed sidekick. It also has a not-so-fine sequel series called ”Catwoman: When in Rome,” a rather airy romp and excellent excuse for Sale to draw Selina Kyle’s rump.
RRrrrrrrrrrrrrrrump rump rump rump RUMP!
[ahem]
If you like Batman: The Long Halloween, you might also like these comics (but don’t take my word for it):
TUNE IN NEXT TIME WHEN YOU HEAR YOU SAY: “Yes, yes, yes, Cash. Very good. These are all very important and very deep and very literary. But I want fun. I want a comic that starts with a man wrestling a space squid.” “I’ll see your space squid and raise you a guy with his head sewn onto a green gorilla, Armageddon, and Zombie Robot Gustave Eiffel.” “Damn. I call.” “Read ‘em and weep, sister. I win. And I believe that means you lose the brassiere, yes?” “::grumble::”
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