Jeph Loeb’s Batman: The Last Halloween has been wrapped up for a while now, and issues #1-10 plus The Long Halloween Special have been collected in graphic novel form. As someone who absolutely loves The Long Halloween and its follow-up Dark Victory, I was naturally excited for this modern sequel, albeit without Tim Sale, the series’s original artist. I previously wrote an article about the early issues of The Last Halloween, where I wasn’t too impressed but still optimistic that it was building to something. Unfortunately, the series never turned itself around, and its ending just fell really flat.
The best part of The Last Halloween was definitely the art. The rotating cast of artists gave at least something to look forward to each issue, as the story was sure to disappoint. While the art style wasn’t consistent, the art itself was consistently good. Eduardo Risso from issue #1 was immediately my favorite, even as the series progressed, but I also thought that Bill Sienkiewicz, Becky Cloonan, and Matteo Scalera were exceptional. Sienkiewicz, in particular is an artist that I knew was very prolific, but I hadn’t previously read anything with his art, so it was cool finally seeing him on a book.
While I did like each artist’s change, in the end, I think that The Last Halloween would have benefited from just having one artist. I brought this up in my last article on this book, but at the time, I didn’t think that it harmed the book too much. Even though I doubt any current artist could depict a world as rich and moody as Sale was able to, it really would have helped the book build up its own identity. One artist focusing on the book would be better able to contribute to the story by being able to slip in their own background details and have input in the story the same way that Sale did. With the constantly changing artists, I got more of the sense that they were working under Loeb rather than in collaboration with him. Although I don’t think that the rotating cast of artists benefited the story well, it did make me much more interested in Risso’s art and more motivated to check out his work on 100 Bullets and Moonshine.
As one last note on the book’s art, I did enjoy each issue’s cover. Centering each main cover around a relevant character while still maintaining the same theme across the whole series was probably the one thing that The Last Halloween emulated well from The Long Halloween and Dark Victory. This was also a good use of having a different artist on each issue, as they were able to infuse their cover with their respective style but still keep that consistent throughline of making it look like a mugshot. I also liked how every issue had a Tim Sale variant cover, especially how some provided color versions of art that were previously only in black and white. A few issues had additional variant covers by other artists that I never felt driven to get, but were neat nonetheless.
I initially read The Last Halloween as it was coming out. This normally wouldn’t work too well with a lengthy mystery series where you have to remember specific details, but the previous installments did a good job of having each issue work by itself, along with tying in with a wider conspiracy. That was not true for The Last Halloween, which I at first thought was fine, just a bit disappointing. However, rereading the whole story on the same day really showed how hardly anything substantial happened at all. The book never stepped up into a murder mystery, only ever dwelling on the villains being shot by an unidentified assailant, which never felt that engaging or like it had to be solved urgently. In addition to not much of anything happening, each issue taking place around a different holiday never played into the story beyond maybe a mention here and there. These two factors really made me question why the story had to happen over the course of a whole year, when it easily could have happened across a few weeks. If it did take place across a shorter timeframe, then it would also partially fix the problem of Batman not really doing anything except work on this case that he makes virtually zero progress on between holidays.
The review from this point on will go into more of the specifics on the story, so if you want to avoid spoilers now would be the time to stop reading. However, I don’t really think that the story of The Last Halloween works well as a sequel to its predecessors or in isolation, so I wouldn’t recommend getting this book for its story.
To start with something good, I thought that The Last Halloween peaked in issues #4 and #5. I really liked how the entirety of the issue #4 was made up of Batman recovering from his wounds from the previous issue. Giving weight to the character’s injuries was something that the previous installments did well, so it is nice to see that continue, at least in this case. Issue #5 was a really fun one, featuring the Joker rounding up villains who had recently escaped from Arkham, and there was some cool stuff done with Scarecrow’s fear toxin. There was good imagery with Batman’s drug induced visions, especially with how it contrasted with his hallucinations in The Long Halloween revolving entirely around his parents, while now they are about Robin’s safety. I also liked how the Joker was actually put out of commission by the toxin, when the stereotypical thing for modern comics to do would be for him to shrug it off.
Even though I found those two issues to be the peak of the series, on both read-throughs this was also the point when I realized that the story was going nowhere. Batman’s recovery and Joker’s rampage were both fun detours, but neither progressed the mystery overall. Before this point I didn’t think that the mystery established itself well, and the following issues didn’t do anything to make me reconsider the facts that I was taking in, resulting in the mystery of the comic to fall completely flat.
Additionally, The Last Halloween doesn’t keep up the thing I liked from issue #4 of there being a weight placed onto injuries. While a lot of emphasis is placed onto Batman’s recovery, Robin’s later recovery from similar injuries is breezed through. In Dark Victory even Batman and Robin accidentally kill a guy by chasing until his heart gives out. In this book, Holiday, the mystery assailant, never accidentally kills anyone despite shooting them, which often compounds with something else like a great fall or a car crash. A clear demonstration of the disparity between how characters deal with wounds before and how they deal with them now is the effects of a shotgun blast to Batman while he wears kevlar, because that happens in both this and Dark Victory. Before, even with the Kevlar he is knocked out for an extended period of time, breaks a few ribs, and takes a moment to think how lucky he was to prepare himself for the blow. Now, that same shot seemingly had no effect on Batman aside from knocking him off balance, and he doesn’t reflect on his luck to come out mostly unscathed at all. The way that this was handled before made it feel like characters were lucky or resourceful if they survived a grave injury, but now it just feels like the recognizable characters are invincible.
That last point about injuries and wounds being taken less seriously is also connected to this general feeling I have that this book went into too much of an action-focused direction. The previous books were more in the crime noir genre, and most action scenes in them were complete blow outs. In the climax of The Long Halloween, despite being faced with most of his foes, Batman swiftly deals with them, because they aren’t really physical threats to him, and action is not what the book is supposed to be about. The Last Halloween, on the other hand, dedicates pages and pages to things like Batman fighting Falcone henchmen, or a bombastic assault on Arkham. These action scenes are just okay, and their inclusion feels like an excuse for Jeph Loeb to not have to write more interesting dialogue in its place.
One particular part of The Last Halloween that came off as half-baked was the FBI subplot. The two FBI agents, Edwards and Sullivan, are eventually revealed to be fake and working for Mario Falcone, but that wasn’t a satisfying reveal at all. It is mentioned that they were keeping tabs on what the GCPD knew about the ongoing conspiracy, but it wasn’t like they were making much progress on solving the mystery on their own, so it didn’t matter that the agents were there to impede them. Additionally, this loops back around to my point of how the story takes place over too long of a period of time, but it makes no sense how Edwards and Sullivan kept up their ruse for so long. It would be one thing if they were real FBI agents paid off by Mario, but their badges ended up being fake too, meaning that for months nobody in the GCPD tried to contact the FBI at all regarding this high profile case. This only gets worse when Amanda Waller, a real FBI agent, showed up, but refused to help out due to personally being mad at Commissioner Gordon, which definitely would not be her call to make. I did like how this in small part hinted more at Gordon’s past in Chicago, but that does not make up for how badly this FBI subplot was handled overall.
While The Long Halloween is already known for having a pretty convoluted mystery, The Last Halloween takes this too far. The conspiracy in the original story was initially divided among three killers and it was clear who could have done what, but in this one you are left with five key figures (at least I think) and little indication of what each one could have done. In The Long Halloween it was also pretty clear that none of the killers had any communication between each other, whereas here it is confusing whether or not Gilda and Mario are working towards the same goal.
The convoluted nature of the original story at least led to surprising turns, so even if you didn’t buy Alberto faking his death or Gilda being the original killer, those reveals still had an undeniable shock value. While also complicated, The Last Halloween doesn’t have any surprising twists. In issue #1, Batman sees Catwoman get shot and immediately wonders if she did that herself, which turned out to be the case. Similarly, Gilda is established early on to be as crazy and conniving as everyone else, that fact never receives any doubt, then it proves true. Even if this story had some out there twist that made no sense, it would be a bad, yet memorable narrative. In its current state though, there are no stand out moments.
Harvey Dent was practically the main character in The Long Halloween. In Dark Victory, he wasn’t on page quite as much, but he was still one of the most prominent characters and he at least talks to Batman a number of times. Then in The Long Halloween Special, he’s once again almost the main character. It would be natural, then, for Two-Face to have a major role in The Last Halloween. However, he didn’t end up doing much of anything in this story, or even showing up all that much. This may be me not fully understanding the story’s events, but I don’t think Two-Face was even behind any scheme, and he came across as taking an overly passive role. In Dark Victory, Two-Face staged a conspiracy to kill the heads of the crime families in Gotham, so it would be reasonable to assume that he would follow that up by further asserting himself in the criminal underworld. The Last Halloween ignores that, and makes it seem like Harvey instead decided to hide away in the sewers without doing anything for years. At the end of the story, Batman thinks to himself, “I miss Harvey Dent”, but this has no impact when they only ended up seeing each other for two brief moments in the entire story.
Part of what made the worlds of The Long Halloween and Dark Victory feel so alive was the many different factions the characters were split between, which The Last Halloween heavily dumbs down. Now organized crime is treated as one big unit, when before even the different families could be further broken down into conflicting agendas. Similarly, Batman and the law enforcement are always on the same page, when before Batman was still treated as an outlaw and frequently butt heads with Commissioner Gordon.
The group that I thought was most negatively impacted by this change were Batman’s core villains. Frequently in comics, villains are written to all be on the same side just because they’re evil, but that was different in The Long Halloween and Dark Victory. The Riddler, for instance, was never actually caught doing any crime, so he was just treated as a smart guy others contacted to help solve mysteries. In the first book, some villains were staunchly against the Falcones, while others would side with them. In its sequel, despite the cohesive conspiracy working to subvert organized crime, Joker and Scarecrow still tried messing with Two-Face by exposing his relationship with the District Attorney. Now, though, they all work together, and seem to all have access to the same information. The Joker capturing his fellow villains in issue #5 had a bit of that original feeling of there being competing groups within the villains, but that was just a drop in the bucket compared to how things used to be. There is a moment later on in the penultimate issue where Joker crosses his fingers behind his back while making a deal with Two-Face, implying a betrayal similar to what happened in Dark Victory, but that never comes up again so I’m not even sure why it was included. Complicated groups becoming simplified is just one of the many interesting things from the previous installments that have been sanded down.
I usually love it when a sequel makes a callback to what came before, because that helps it feel more cohesive with its source material. However, The Last Halloween overdoes its use of callbacks, to the point where they stop feeling like callbacks and just feel lazy. I’ve already mentioned this with the allusion of Joker betraying Two-Face aping from Dark Victory and Two-Face for some reason still operating out of the sewers, but there are a lot more. Gordon’s wife leaves him again. Batman and Catwoman again fight at the Falcone penthouse. Gilda’s still doing shady things in the basement of a house that she doesn’t even own anymore. A Falcone that has gone crazy is once again one of the main culprits. Poison Ivy kidnapping Mario and controlling Catwoman felt like it was ripping off both The Long Halloween and Hush at the same time. While not pulling from something directly written by Jeph Loeb, Gilda having a secret affair with a Falcone felt straight from The Long Halloween’s animated adaptation. The most frustrating one was probably how they call the figure behind the mystery Holiday once again. This was a terrible creative choice to make, because it only made the story less unique and harder to follow. When Batman questioned the identity of Holiday, I at first thought that he was referring to the mystery in The Long Halloween, which he should know the answer to by now, when he was really talking about the current Holiday. It may seem obvious that he would be talking about the ongoing mystery, but it wasn’t when many of the suspects are the same as that first book. As I’ve already said, I like callbacks that are made in moderation and for a purpose, but the frequency at which The Last Halloween makes these references and how thoughtlessly it does so is probably the biggest thing dragging the book down.
My last criticism is hyper specific and probably not something anyone else cared about, but Solomon Grundy’s role in this comic really bugged me, and I’ve realized that his presence is a good microcosm of my previous criticisms. He is “killed” early on in the story, but he has already come back from worse things, so there was zero reason to care. This is affirmed when Grundy comes shortly after this death. For the rest of the story, he doesn’t do anything that a regular henchman could not have done. This connects to my thoughts on Two-Face’s weird stagnation, because by this point he really should have more people working for him than the first guy he met after getting acid thrown in his face. Solomon Grundy worked in the original The Long Halloween because there was this contrast between a grounded crime noir and the inclusion of a hulking zombie creature, while still working together on a tonal level. The surprise of that contrast has worn off by now, and as the narrative moves away from noir and more towards traditional superhero action, Grundy’s presence doesn’t feel as interesting anymore. To me, it doesn’t feel like Loeb included Grundy because he thought that it would benefit the story, instead doing so because he was there in the previous books so he is obligated to be in this one too.
To say something more positive about The Last Halloween as I wrap up is that I really liked the backmatter of each issue. This included an interview with the issue’s respective artist, a look at the artist’s art process, and all of the issue’s variant covers. Normally behind the scenes content is saved for some expensive “deluxe edition” later down the road, so it was nice to see so much included in the single issues. With how expensive comics are nowadays, it is nice that DC took the extra mile to make every issue feel a bit more worth its value.
As you’ve probably gathered by now, I don’t recommend that you read Batman: The Last Halloween. The story tells a convoluted, yet uninteresting mystery, and most aspects of the book have been done better by other comics. I have more, less major criticisms of the story, but the article had to end at some point. The art throughout is very good, but still doesn’t make the book worth a buy. If you are a fan of The Long Halloween, then maybe I would recommend The Long Halloween Special, because it was done when Tim Sale was still alive, while the story is enjoyable enough and works without reading the rest of The Last Halloween. Me not recommending the book was not solely for its quality, though that is a major factor, but also because there are so many other Batman comics out that are good. I have really enjoyed the beginning of Batman/Green Arrow/The Question: Arcadia, and look forward to keeping up with it. While I tried out Matt Fraction’s Batman and didn’t like it, I know that a lot of people do, as it seems to deliver on a less grounded and more light hearted Batman narrative. I was initially uninterested in Scott Snyder’s Absolute Batman because I’m not a fan of most of his other work, but its rave reviews have certainly piqued my curiosity. A recent Bat-book that I feel the most inclined to recommend, however, is Batman: Dark Patterns by Dan Waters and Hayden Sherman. It feels straight from that late ‘80s through the ‘90s era of Batman, and delivers four unique and interesting mysteries. I probably would have been even more disappointed in The Last Halloween if Dark Patterns wasn’t coming out at the same time and fulfilling what I ideally want out of a Batman comic. If you are the type to read a long article on a sequel to The Long Halloween, then Dark Patterns is probably up your alley, and if you want to read it physically, then you will be able to get the collected edition that comes out March 31st.
