1968
The first comic to rebuild Harvey Dent (aka Two-Face) into a household name, The Long Halloween is not full of much originality, but does an incredible job of blending so much of what makes Batman great into a film-noir style cinematic masterpiece.
Jeph Loeb is not a household name, but has been behind a lot of popular entertainment going back all the way to the original Teen Wolf and Teen Wolf Too which he co-wrote with his future Heroes collaborator
Tim Kring! He has worked on superhero television shows like the Flash and Smallville as well as mega-popular Lost. But he's been collecting comic books since the seventies and writing them since the nineties. Although I think much of his work is over-rated, he consistantly writes with high standards and a love and respect for the genre that better writers often struggle with.
The Long Halloween is probably Jeph Loeb's best work, a murder mystery and character piece capped by an artistic vision which is necessary for all great works in the comics world. The quantity of full page Batman spreads does nothing to undermine the fact that Batman just looks... f*ckin' bad-ass in this series. The fantastic art work that captures Batman's awesomeness and also makes old standbys like the Joker and Catwoman seem so fresh is by
Tim Sale. I've been a fan of Tim's since his earliest work on my much-beloved
Myth Adventures series. Although Loeb and Sale list themselves as mutual storytellers in their frequent collaborations, my opinion is that Loeb's notable works would be far less notable without Sale's style and Eisner-winning talent.
The setting was a problem for me. I have been reading some collections of Best Of DC comics characters, such as Batman, and have been reading them according to when they were written. Cartoon and comic characters like these just never traditionally aged, like Charlie Brown and Bart Simpson. But unlike the Sunday funnies, Marvel comics came along and started taking their storylines seriously and DC followed suit. So eventually DC Comics had to address their decades of continuity by wiping out the 50 years of unaging backstory in the first historic Crisis and relaunching the origins and backstories of all the DC characters.
I haven't read a lot of those relaunches (aka 'Year One'), and I truly don't know if they were given any specific time-setting other than 'prior to now'. But I do own and covet the Frank Miller
Batman Year One. The Long Halloween is generally conceded as occuring in that universe. In reviewing both volumes, I made the call that the fashion and technology reflected in the art was a gritty late-sixties look. Maybe 15 years is too long a span than mid-eighties writers had in mind... Maybe I should have waited until I got to the eighties to read all of the Year One volumes and then bounce back into modern continuity... Maybe I should have sheltered my kids from all Star Wars media so they wouldn't know who Vader was when they first saw Episode IV..
The bottom line was that I was pumped to read Long Halloween and made the call that 1968 was a good time frame. Especially in light of knowing the huge influence it had on the recent Dark Knight movie. And although the storyline is convoluted enough that I had to re-read the plot on Wikipedia to remember the conclusion of the mystery, I was not disappointed in the least. I gave the graphic novel 5 out of 5 on Good Reads, and would whole heartedly recommend it to casual Batman fans who may not read comics normally but could dig getting into something with substance.
If you liked the latest Batman movies, or would like to read a series that is likely to stay on the top ten list of Batman comics for a very long time, then The Long Halloween is a must read.
The first comic to rebuild Harvey Dent (aka Two-Face) into a household name, The Long Halloween is not full of much originality, but does an incredible job of blending so much of what makes Batman great into a film-noir style cinematic masterpiece.
Jeph Loeb is not a household name, but has been behind a lot of popular entertainment going back all the way to the original Teen Wolf and Teen Wolf Too which he co-wrote with his future Heroes collaborator Tim Kring! He has worked on superhero television shows like the Flash and Smallville as well as mega-popular Lost. But he's been collecting comic books since the seventies and writing them since the nineties. Although I think much of his work is over-rated, he consistantly writes with high standards and a love and respect for the genre that better writers often struggle with.
The Long Halloween is probably Jeph Loeb's best work, a murder mystery and character piece capped by an artistic vision which is necessary for all great works in the comics world. The quantity of full page Batman spreads does nothing to undermine the fact that Batman just looks... f*ckin' bad-ass in this series. The fantastic art work that captures Batman's awesomeness and also makes old standbys like the Joker and Catwoman seem so fresh is by Tim Sale. I've been a fan of Tim's since his earliest work on my much-beloved Myth Adventures series. Although Loeb and Sale list themselves as mutual storytellers in their frequent collaborations, my opinion is that Loeb's notable works would be far less notable without Sale's style and Eisner-winning talent.
The setting was a problem for me. I have been reading some collections of Best Of DC comics characters, such as Batman, and have been reading them according to when they were written. Cartoon and comic characters like these just never traditionally aged, like Charlie Brown and Bart Simpson. But unlike the Sunday funnies, Marvel comics came along and started taking their storylines seriously and DC followed suit. So eventually DC Comics had to address their decades of continuity by wiping out the 50 years of unaging backstory in the first historic Crisis and relaunching the origins and backstories of all the DC characters.
I haven't read a lot of those relaunches (aka 'Year One'), and I truly don't know if they were given any specific time-setting other than 'prior to now'. But I do own and covet the Frank Miller Batman Year One. The Long Halloween is generally conceded as occuring in that universe. In reviewing both volumes, I made the call that the fashion and technology reflected in the art was a gritty late-sixties look. Maybe 15 years is too long a span than mid-eighties writers had in mind... Maybe I should have waited until I got to the eighties to read all of the Year One volumes and then bounce back into modern continuity... Maybe I should have sheltered my kids from all Star Wars media so they wouldn't know who Vader was when they first saw Episode IV..
The bottom line was that I was pumped to read Long Halloween and made the call that 1968 was a good time frame. Especially in light of knowing the huge influence it had on the recent Dark Knight movie. And although the storyline is convoluted enough that I had to re-read the plot on Wikipedia to remember the conclusion of the mystery, I was not disappointed in the least. I gave the graphic novel 5 out of 5 on Good Reads, and would whole heartedly recommend it to casual Batman fans who may not read comics normally but could dig getting into something with substance.
If you liked the latest Batman movies, or would like to read a series that is likely to stay on the top ten list of Batman comics for a very long time, then The Long Halloween is a must read.
the long halloween is my favorite indeed
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