Batman: The Long Halloween is one of Batman’s most beloved and classic storylines. It details Batman’s year long hunt for the mysterious Holiday Killer, and not only gave fans the incredible trio of Batman, Commissioner Gordon, and Harvey Dent which beautifully set up Dent’s descent into villainy and why it hurt so badly, but also serves as the perfect inbetween story that shows how Gotham turned from a city run by organized crime to one rampant with costumed villainy. It’s a fantastic mystery and an even better story, and although the late great artist Tim Sale passed away in 2022, acclaimed writer Jeph Loeb has returned to revisit the classic story with another sequel, Batman: The Long Halloween — The Last Halloween. Unfortunately, as much as I want to and do love this story, it’s definitely far more fan service than it is substance.
The Last Halloween is Disjointed and Disappointing
Only seven of the ten issues for The Last Halloween have been released, so this assessment of it can easily be changed by the time of the last three issues release. However, based on how much has happened in its first two-thirds, I feel comfortable enough talking about the problems that have plagued the series since issue one. For the most part, the plot seems to be a genuinely compelling main mystery, but one that is dragged out for too long and weighed down by too many subplots that feel like they don’t belong together. Let’s start by focusing on the main story, which I am more than willing to admit is a bit confusing to me, but then again that is likely the point, given the flow of the original Long Halloween.
The main mystery involves Batman and Robin tackling a supposed copycat of the original Holiday Killer that stalked Gotham’s underworld for a year. But instead of killing people connected to Falcone crime family, this time Holiday is wounding one of Batman’s supervillain rogues, seemingly with the intent of sending them to Arkham’s hospital. The real identity of Holiday still remains a mystery, but there’s plenty of misdirection that keeps the readers on their toes, with the leading suspects being Mario Falcone, Gilda Dent, and Two Face. However, much like The Long Halloween, it seems likely that there are multiple killers, given that Calendar Man was revealed to be the copycat that shot Poison Ivy in issue #7. Ultimately, while this is an intriguing plot, it feels very dragged out and convoluted, with moments that don’t really make sense. Take the reveal that the FBI agents that were antagonizing Batman were actually Mario’s men and had no connection to the FBI. How did nobody realize that? There was the explanation that Jim was too concerned with his missing son, sure, but that doesn’t change the fact that these two would have had to have a lot of paperwork for a lot of people in Gotham to go over, which they clearly didn’t have. Them having access to everything without any clearances or IDs just doesn’t make sense, even in Gotham.
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On the subject of Jim Gordon, let’s turn to the subplots. The resolution to son’s kidnapping was purely anticlimactic, and his marital troubles feel forced into the narrative, like the story really wanted Jim Gordon but didn’t know what to do with him. Then there’s Catwoman hiding out in Arkham Asylum because she’s afraid of someone on the outside she refuses to talk about, and despite knowing that she’s been doing this for the past six months Batman hasn’t looked into it at all. Of course, there’s also her ties to the Falcone family and her obsession with getting something from them, likely the painting she keeps bringing up. While this was a necessary and interesting part of The Long Halloween, here it just kind of feels tacked on, like she has to have this goal because she had a tie to the Falcones in the original story, even though her constant sneaking out of Arkham goes against her desire to hide there for the foreseeable future. It all feels slightly performative, like it’s trying but falling short of recapturing the magic of the original classic.
DC is Obsessed with Nostalgia
There are good bones to The Last Halloween with its genuinely intriguing mystery, but it’s completely bogged down by constantly tying in every element of The Last Halloween and Dark Victory when it does not need to. The story spends so much time focusing on Jim Gordon’s marriage when the only relevance it has to the overarching plot is very, very generously saying that it’s meant to parallel the messy devotion of the Dents, but Jim was a major player in The Long Halloween so he has to be here. There are obvious leads that Batman does not follow because they would have him learn too much too quickly, and The Long Halloween famously always had Batman on the backfoot, scrambling for clues. Joker showed up at about the midway point of The Long Halloween as an agent of chaos, and he did the same thing here, but with far less thematic and plot relevance than in the original.
The Last Halloween is doing everything it can to remind the fans of The Long Halloween, but it’s so focused on doing that that it loses focus on telling an interesting and fun story. I do not say all of this to imply that The Last Halloween is a bad story, far from it. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed a lot of it so far, but while there are great moments in a vacuum, it ultimately falls short of its true potential because of its determination to be just like what came before. This is far from just this story’s problem, as other storylines such as “Hush 2” and the renaming of Justice League Unlimited proves that DC is pushing as hard as they can to weaponize nostalgia to keep fans coming back.
There are so many great moments in The Last Halloween. Barbara Gordan and Robin going trick-or-treating, Harvey and Gilda interacting, Robin visiting his mother’s grave. All of these are great, and seeing Batman once again tackle the Holiday Killer case and unravel it is an invigorating ride, but all this does is appeal to what fans already love without building on it as nearly as much as another sequel to such a legendary comic deserves. Nostalgia is holding DC and its stories back, but if they let it just be what it would be, I guarantee this and many other stories would be so good that nobody could complain. I really hope The Last Halloween improves in its final issues, because it has so much potential.
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