Customer Reviews

Batman : The Long Halloween

5 star:		(113)
4 star:		(44)
3 star:		(16)
2 star:		(13)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

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.

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.

People always ask themselves the question what is it about the Dark Knight that makes him one of the most enduring and popular characters of our time? This wonderfully scripted trade paperback edition of the Long Halloween points to the answer. The book delves deeply into the criminal elemant of Gotham and bring out the best of Batman, who you see very little of when it come to the action scenes, but a lot of in scenes depicting conversation. The mood is very dark in this comic and reminisces the first Batman movie by Tim Burton. Batman sticks to the shadows and you just can't help but feel intimidated when he slowly walks out. The element of fear has always been the Bat's strongest features and this book really shines through when it comes to that. The coloring by Gregory Wright suits the mood so well that yopu feel as if you're that third person looking at things from behind a lens. Tim Sale is without a doubt one of the most promising talents out there. His soft, smooth approach to the characters makes better than the detailed, cartoony features that have become the norm in this day and age. Jeph Loeb scripts one of his best stories in there and you can interact with the characters and understant their expectations and wants. The story is suspenseful, thrilling with action in just the right places. Loeb brings out half of Batman's rogue gallery and portrays them right without them overstaying their welcome through and through.

If you're a fan of Batman, his first movie and the Godfather all put into one, you'll never put this book down (I read it continuously without a break). If you're just a Batman fan, then You'll be seeing the character written at his best.

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.

Batman: The Long Halloween is a story set in the early years of Batman's history. The writer apparently sets out to do three things in this story. First, it depicts the transition of Gotham from a city where the mob ran rampant to one where a rogues gallery of homicidal maniacs and super-villains have pushed the old criminals out. Second, it shows different visions of justice in the guises of Batman, Harvey Dent, and Jim Gordon. Third, it presents a murder mystery which is supposed to be intriguing and a challenge to the World's Greatest Detective. Well, it accomplishes the first two and fails miserably with the last. Although some readers might think the ending is clever, in my view, it is not for the simple reason that the writer did not play fair with neither Batman nor the audience. No clues were given to point to the identity of the real killer, so neither Batman nor the reader has any chance at uncovering the villain's identity. Moreover, the writer breaks the cardinal rule of writing a murder mystery...if the killer has something to gain, the detective must find whatever that is to track the killer down. In this story, that was absent because by committing the murders, the killer actually pushed what that person wanted farther away from the killer. Finally, as for the detective himself, Batman basically phones in any attempt to engage in detective work in the story and really does nothing to try and solve the underlying crimes because of the distractions caused by his rogues gallery.

Now for the parts that were brilliant. The artwork was excellent, very noir and fit the story well. The story does a fantastic job of rounding out Dent's character and making him far more believable than other stories have shown in the past. Selina/Catwoman looked sexy and was an interesting character in the story (although the writer fails to explain why she was involved with the mobsters). As for the rogues gallery, some of the depictions were fantastic, such as the Scarecrow, Ivy, and the Mad Hatter. I did have problems with the drawings of the Joker...too many teeth and a bit too stylistic. Also, the depiction of Solomon Grundy was very lame. Grundy, at times, has given the entire JLA fits. Yet, a young Batman was able to give him a bloody nose with one punch? Very inconsistent. He wasn't that important to the story to screw up the character's capabilities like that.

So, this story starts with a bang but due to the dropped plotlines, the poor job of connecting the dots, and the muddled motive, it misses the target and fails in its bid to become a classic like Kingdom Come.

The Long Halloween is good but not great. It has atmosphere, and is a brisk, fun read, but it doesn't hold up to even casual scrutiny. First, I must confess that I have a strong dislike of story lines that run a parade of villains through the narrative. This story is a great example of why. The villains get short shrift, and their formidability is diminished to the point where they are usually dispatched within a page or two. Who are they? What makes them so important in Batman's rogues' gallery? All we get is the ubiquitous "pin-up" page and then we move on. He beats them as easily as he would a mugger. There is even one ridiculous point in which Joker, Two Face, Scarecrow, Mad Hatter, Solomon Grundy, Poison Ivy, and I think even the Penguin (but he doesn't say anything and hadn't been in the story at any other point before, while the others had), are all together in a room, facing him. The Batman (with a little help from Cat Woman) dispatches all of them in a page or two. How is it that these villains can be so diabolical and confound Batman for multiple issue story lines in other books and then be so easily beaten here? Also, the "twist ending" makes no sense whatsoever.
In fact, this whole story was told much more concisely only 5 or 6 years before this one, in the 1990 Batman Annual, by Andrew Helfer and Chris Sprouse. It's the same core story, focusing on the origin of Two Face. There's the trial of mob boss Morconi (complete with Batman in disguise in the gallery), the duplicitous assistant D.A. Fields, and Dent's troubled history with his father; however, it resonates far more effectively because of the manner in which it explores Harvey's psychological turmoil and because it never veers from that. By going for depth rather than breadth, the story packs more of a punch in 55 or so pages than The Long Halloween's 370, and since it doesn't go for pin-ups every other page, it takes about as long to read too.

Here's another offering from the kings of retro, Jeph Loeb (writer) and Tim Sale (artist), reexamining Batman during his mythical "Year One" period. If you believe the intro to this volume, this story was meant to be a sequel to Frank Miller's classic retelling of the Dark Knight's early days in "Batman: Year One" (1986/7). As a story, this work is pretty weak in many areas; as a sequel, is simply falls short of the tight, mature storytelling of Frank Miller's original.

The story centers on the Roman family (originally introduced in "Batman: Year One"), a serial killer who offs people in creative ways during holiday seasons and the trio out to stop the crimes - Batman, Jim Gordon and Harvey Dent. Tim Sale is especially suitable for a work like this - his moody, atmospheric and splash-pages art are truly a sight to behold. You feel yourself being sucked into Batman's Gotham. My primary complaint is with Jeph Loeb's writing. Like my previous review of "Superman for All Seasons", my views of the man's writing hasn't changed. I like HOW he writes - I just dislike WHAT he writes! He's a great scripter, providing witty, timely and simply apt dialogues and caption boxes that the whole thing read very smoothly even though it runs into 300+ pages. The problem is with his insipid plotting. He should have someone else plot his tales and script over them. For example, in order to maintain the novelty of "holiday-themed killings", the story is stretched across THIRTEEN months and countless murders - and finally Batman catches the killer (but we are told that he got the wrong guy). And this is the "World's Greatest Detective"? Meanwhile, Batman consults a Hannibal-Lecter-like Calendar Man who is incapacitated in prison but seemingly knows the identity of the killer (?!?). See the problem? Batman, Gordon and Harvey are supposedly super-cops and they run around like madmen without a clue to the killer and you have this locked-up guy knowing the truth behind everything? Granted, Loeb was trying to set up a "Silence of the Lambs" scene with Calendar Man but therein lies the weakness of the whole thing. It is a scene set up for its own sake and doesn't contribute anything to the STORY. We live in times wherein comic writers are a lot more influenced by TV and movies than literature. And Loeb, former screenwriter, epitomize this new breed of writers who set up cool scenes, writes clever dialogue, provides the atmosphere with the right artistic collaboration but ultimately delivers something very hollow and shallow. "The Long Halloween" is often compared to the pulp classics of Chandler and Hammett. I disagree vehemently. Loeb and Sale gave us "mood" and "cool scenes" but ultimately the story is without gusto, the characters lack the machismo and grit of true noirish anti-heroes, and though the atmosphere is there, it lacks the tight, all-encompassing claustrophobia of the great noirish works.

The only redeeming factor in this work is the retelling of Two-Face's origin. Loeb is especially great in the quiet "character" moments and here, the tragic story of Harvey Dent's transformation into Two-Face is beautifully retold. But Loeb's strength is often his most-glaring fault at the same time. For example the book begins with a full-page drawing of a grim-looking Bruce Wayne muttering, "I believe in Gotham City" - a scene I found to be laughably out-of-character for the flamboyant playboy persona of Bruce Wayne! This kinds of out-of-character scenes abound throughout the story. All in all, this story should have been better written by a more gritty writer like Greg Rucka or Ed Brubaker (both of them have written far better Batman stories than Loeb here).

The 80s were the times of the Bat. The revolution in the Batman comics, started in the mid-seventies by people like Dennis O'neil and Neal Adams, reached its peak in the eighties, with the works of such brilliant writers as Mike W. Barr, Alan Moore, Grant Morrison and, obviously, Frank Miller. Tim Burton's Batman, possibly the finest comics-based feature film, was also made at that time. The nineties weren't as favorable to the Dark Knight. The artistic barrier was broken, and the spirit of revolution that characterized 80s comics drifted away. With Neil Gaiman and others of his kind becoming the main power in adult comics, Batman was, once again, mainstream. Although some good stories were published, none had the impact and inventiveness of Frank Miller's Batman.

Which is why I was very pleasently surprised to read the Long Halloween, a collected mini-series originally published in 1996, which is probably the finest Batman story released since Grant Morrison's masterpiece 'Arkham Asylum: Serious House on Serious Earth' in 1989. It was the first work I've ever read of either writer Jeph Loeb or artist Tim Sale. Loeb's dialogue is extremely powerful, flawless, reminding me of Frank Miller's writing on 'Dark Knight Returns' or 'Ronin'. Sale's wonderful artwork and brilliant use of close-ups, color and page compositions brought back memories of Dave Gibbons' work on 'Watchmen'.

The storyline was the best I've seen in years, recreating the story of Harvey Dent, aka Two-Face - in my mind, the most interesting of Batman's many enemies. It's a detective story, very different from the action-packed style of most 90s Batman, with the beautifuly created atmosphere of a film-noir. A family of gangsters and a serial killer are the actual 'villains' in the Long Halloween, but the main idea - the main conflict in the story - is the friendship of Batman, Harvey Dent and Comm. Gordon, and the old question of law and justice; some of Batman's more standart Arkham Asylum residing foes are brought in for short appearences, not stealing the show but giving this extremely long story some energy. Dent's personality is crafted brilliantly, as is the relationship between the three law enforcers, and the story of Dent's fall into crime is more tragic and touching than ever. The Long Halloween is one for the ages.

Set early in Batman's career, The Long Halloween is a masterful tale.
The story is about a crime wave that hits Gotham. A killer (killers?) are shooting up members of Gotham's various crime families. Batman is on the case, working together with Gotham City Police Captain Jim Gordon and District Attorney Harvey Dent to find out who the mysterious Holiday killer is. Dent is also having troubles at home, and he's being transformed. Batman fears that he's losing a friend. How right he may be. The story contains many of your favorite Batman villians, such as Joker, Scarecrow, Poison Ivy, and many more. And, it tells the origin of Two-Face beautifully. The ending will leave you surprised. I read all of this in one sitting and could not bring myself to put it down. This story is continued in Batman: Dark Victory, also by Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale
Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale are a match made in heaven. Loeb's gloomy style of storytelling fits in perfectly with Sale's artwork. Together, they weave a great tale of suspense for all Batman fans, and even fans of a good old murder mystery.

Perhaps the best comic series I've ever read. So good that it forces even those who believe all comicbooks are stupid to pay attention. Better than most mystery novels of recent memory, and many mystery films as well. Establishes the graphic novel as a fine format for "film noir." Worth reading more than once.