Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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77 of 82 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Perfectly Balanced, Subtle Batman Noir, February 27, 2002
This ode to Frank Miller's "Year One", itself a noir take on Batman's early career, provides a note-perfect genre piece that should thrill anyone looking for a Batman whodunit. The story has Batman, early in his career, taking on the mob and a serial killer who strikes on holidays. The story is drum tight through thirteen issues (350+ pages), set from Halloween to Halloween, with a poetic pacing and use of graphic tension found only in top-notch graphic novels. Harvey Dent is heavily featured along with a young Jim Gordon. For Batman scholars, Dent's presence alone provides a backdrop of foreboding. The usual rogue's gallery weaves through the book, including a jealous Joker, out to outdo the serial killer, a cornered, yet elegantly neurotic Riddler, and a wildly abstracted, sensual Poison Ivy, along with a little more mind-altering mayhem from the Scarecrow and Mad Hatter. What I appreciated most about Jeph [sic!] Loeb's telling is that the criminals are reduced to their elemental symbols, where a gesture or a glance conveys as much as a panel of narrated text. The clues are perfect red herrings in the grand whodunit fashion. Fans of Batman know bad things are going to happen when a stranger passes a rose to a character who then pricks their finger on its thorns. Similarly, even a hardened Gotham detective shudders upon seeing a murder victim with a smile on his face. My only misgiving about this book is that if a reader wasn't acquainted with Batman and the usual Arkham cast, the subtletly of this telling will almost certainly be missed. On the other hand, this'll be a great place to start an education. Tim Sale's art is compelling. Noir's a difficult effect to convey in comics, and it comes through beautifully in a shadowy, mostly gray and earth tone palette behind strong inking. This cool, muted ground provides the perfect foil against which to contrast the costumed villains, ratcheting up the tension another notch.
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15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Fantastic early-career Batman story, October 31, 1999
By A Customer
Long Halloween works on so many levels. I went into this book knowing how it was going to end and it still captivated me. It is both a murder mystery and a story of a fall from grace. The main plotline-the mystery of the identity of a serial killer who murders members of the Falcone and Maroni crime families every major holiday-almost takes a back seat to the tragic transformation of Harvey Dent, who starts out as Batman and Captain Gordon's partner and friend and becomes one of their greatest foes by the end of the story. This series ranks alongside the Killing Joke as an important piece of Batman continuity as well as examining Batman's relationship with his enemies. Loeb's writing is good minimalism, packing so much power into so little dialouge. Tim Sale's artwork is just beautiful. He is one of the most talented pencilers ever, and breaths new visual life to several Batman characters. The series is lenghty but it is also fast paced and can be read in a relatively short amount of time. The pacing of the artwork is near-perfect, save for the unsettling abundance of splash pages. This series also well balances Batman's foes between pyschologically and physically deformed supercriminals and regular human gansters. After reading this and the first issue of its follow-up Dark Victory, one can only wonder why team Long Halloween does not work on a regular Batman title.
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11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Top-notch early career Batman story, August 4, 1999
By A Customer
The Long Halloween is one of my favorite additions to the Batman canon. It is an intriguing mystery that fleshes out the early years of the careers of Batman, Commissioner Gordon (here Captain Gordon), and District Attorney Harvey Dent. The story focuses on the efforts of these three men of justice to bring down the criminal empire of Carmine "The Roman" Falcone, a character who made his debut in Frank Miller's Batman: Year One. Over the year that the story spans, our heroes are being aided in this endeavor by a mysterious killer who murders a victim of the Falcone family around each of the major holidays. Also during this time, many of the members of Batman's rogues' gallery show up to make plays of their own. The writer/artist team of Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale is one of the best currently working in the comics field. Loeb's writing comes closer to letting the reader into Batman's mind than most, but still keeps the distance that the character demands. The Falcone family is portrayed as a pretty stereotypical mafia family. If you are a fan of the Godfather films, you will find plenty of homages/thefts to those works here, right from the opening panel. But they serve the purpose of providing fodder for the holiday killer. It's what Loeb does with Harvey Dent that makes this book. Two-Face, for me, was always an interesting idea for a villain, but always came across, oddly enough, rather one-dimensionally. By having a story that is set before Dent's transformation, Loeb is not constrained by the "Number 2" modus operandi the character is inevitably saddled with. Dent here is more like the Han Solo character. Cocky and unintimidated by anyone, he's so much more fun to read here it almost makes me wish we could throw continuity out the door and pretend he never got that acid thrown in his face. What Alan Moore did for the Joker in The Killing Joke, Jeph Loeb does for Two-Face here. One more thing about the writing: Loeb knows when to write and when to let Tim Sale's beautiful artwork tell the story. So sometimes there are several pages with little or no words. The murders, for example, are all presented in complete silence, which is just as it should be. As for the art, Tim Sale provides some of the best representations of the Batman characters I've ever seen. His work is slightly stylistic on the "normal" characters, and wildly exaggerated on the "supervillains", but without making the characters look like they belong in separate books. Sale's Batman is the definitive one for me, and his version of the Joker second only to Brian Bolland's. Added to this is his expert use of shading and page layouts that look like scenes from movies. Absolutely top-notch stuff. If you only buy comics for the pictures, this book is still worth the money. But I'd recommend reading it too.
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