With The Batman, The Penguin, and Christopher Nolan's Dark Knight trilogy all drawing ideas from it, The Long Halloween has become the most influential Batman comic ever

Sep. 30, 2024

Opinion | Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale’s masterpiece continues to inspire all these years later

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If you ask comic book fans what the most influential Batman stories are, they will probably cite Frank Miller’s Batman: Year One orThe Dark Knight Returns. They’re not wrong, necessarily, but hands down the single most influential comic on modern Batman movies and TV shows – particularly HBO’s currently airing one of thebest shows on Maxright now,The Penguin– is Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale’s The Long Halloween and its sequels.

Spoilers for Batman: The Long Halloween

Part of what makes The Long Halloween and its sequels so influential is the period where it’s set in Batman continuity.Batman: Year One by Miller and David Mazzucchellipresents a younger Batman just being introduced to Gotham, and it ends with a tease of the Joker, something that Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins (one of thebest HBO Max moviescurrently streaming) directly picked up on. However, the book is mostly concerned with Batman’s relationship with Jim Gordon, and the crime families of Gotham; the Falcones in particular.

Loeb and Sale picked up the ball Miller and Mazzuchelli left behind and ran with it, presenting a canonical Year Two for Batman that charted the fall of the mobs and the rise of the freaks in Gotham City. Most of the plot of The Long Halloween involves Holiday targeting members of the Falcone and Maroni crime families, picking them off one by one. Meanwhile, villains like Riddler, Poison Ivy, and more start popping up in the city… And as the Falcones recruit them to help out against Holiday, the mantle of power begins to pass from the old-school mobs to the new-school supervillains, with Holiday bridging the gap… He’s one of the freaks but also is revealed to be Alberto Falcone, the scion of the Faclone crime family. His reveal as the killer is, essentially, the death knell for the mobs. It’s that fraught tension that powers the series and has made it a classic, and it’s that same tension that has enamored countless film and TV makers.

There’s no better example of this transition than one of the main characters of The Long Halloween: Harvey Dent. He’s an ally of Batman’s, a DA trying to do the right thing in Gotham. But when he is caught in the middle of the spiraling gang war between the Falcones and Maronis, he ends up having his face hideously scarred. And thus he becomes Two-Face, one of the very freaks that has been causing the mob families to run around like chickens with their heads cut off in the first place.

Anyone with a passing familiarity with Nolan’s Batman movies,Matt Reeves' The Batman, The Penguin, or even Fox’s Gotham (particularly Season 4) can see the DNA right on the surface. WhileBatman Beginsused elements of The Long Halloween, the characterization of Harvey Dent, Jim Gordon, and Batman’s relationship in The Dark Knight is straight from the comic book series. Similarly, The Batman wears its influences on its sleeve… The whole plot of the movie sets Batman in year two of his career and shows the death of Carmine Falcone (John Turturro) thanks to the machinations of The Riddler. And not for nothing, but the opening of the movie is set on – when else? – Halloween.

The Penguin picks up right from there, with the Falcones and Maronis in disarray… And more importantly the return ofSofia Falcone(Cristin Milioti), a key figure in The Long Halloween who is later revealed to be Dark Victory’s Hangman killer. And what is Sofia known as in The Penguin when she’s released from Arkham Asylum? The Hangman.

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So if you’re hunting for clues on what might happen next on The Penguin, where Reeves might go inThe Batman Part II, or simply want to know what Gotham City was like before its monthly Joker attacks then look no further than The Long Halloween, Dark Victory, and the currently running The Last Halloween – a body of work that continues to influence the future of the Dark Knight’s onscreen adventures, while looking back to his past.

Batman: The Long Halloween - The Last Halloween #1 is out now from DC. The Penguin is streaming now on Sky and NOW in the UK and on HBO in the US.

Alex Zalben has previously written for MTV News, TV Guide, Decider, and more. He’s the co-host and producer of the long-running Comic Book Club podcast, and the writer of Thor and the Warrior Four, an all-ages comic book series for Marvel.

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