The Sequel to 1 of the Best Batman Stories Is Also a Touching Tribute

With Batman: The Long Halloween, Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale influenced countless comics and multimedia depictions of the Dark Knight. Prior to Sale’s passing in 2022, he and Loeb planned a definitive conclusion to their saga, Batman: The Long Halloween — The Last Halloween. As a tribute to his longtime friend, Loeb is teaming up with a whole host of superstar artists to tell that story, closing out the war for Gotham City’s soul between its organized crime syndicates and the rise of supervillains.

In an interview with CBR, Loeb reveals the origins of The Last Halloween. He further explains how he assembled a bullpen of all-stars to collaborate on the tribute to Sale’s enduring legacy. Last but not least, he teases what fans can expect when Batman: The Long Halloween – The Last Halloween hits shelves on Sept. 25, 2024.

CBR: The Last Halloween was initially devised by you and Tim Sale years ago. What was the kernel that began that idea for this seminal Batman story, and how did it become what audiences are about to see?

Jeph Loeb:
This all began around 2021. We were coming up on one of the anniversaries for the book. For me,
The Long Halloween
will always be part of a six-part set. It’s the three prequels — which were
the
Halloween
specials
,
The Long Halloween
,
Dark Victory
and
Catwoman: When in Rome
— the six different stories that Tim and I did, along with Richard Starkings. In the case of
Dark Victory
, we had Mark Chiarello as our editor, because we had lost Archie Goodwin.

I had been running this little operation called Marvel Television and, during that time I was not writing comics for about a 12-year period. I came back to Tim and said, I think there’s a last story, a story that ties up any of the bread crumbs that we left along the way, as well as answering the hard question — which, for me, was what happened to the Falcone family.

Here was this empire that was taken away from them in
The Long Halloween
, and then they struck back in
Dark Victory
, but we know that, in present-day, none of those characters exist — except they keep showing up in movies, TV shows and animated things, and that’s amazing! The fact that Chris Nolan, Matt Reeves, and that
Sofia Falcone
is going to be in the new
Penguin
show on HBO, and she’s on
Gotham
, is great. Guys, please plunder!

We did the special which, to be perfectly honest, was because I think DC wanted to know if we could still put out a book, because committing to a years-long story is madness.
They were like let’s start with this special, and then we can talk about
The Last Halloween
. We wrote and drew the special with the idea that it was going to be the prologue, which is why it ends with a “to be continued” feel to it. Sure enough, as soon as it came out, they called and were like “Let’s do this now!”

The good news is we have a ten-part outline for what the story is going to be. I got started and wrote the first two scripts, and then Tim was gone. I didn’t even think about
The Long Halloween
. I had lost my friend, my partner, this guy I talked to all the time about stories, music, art, women and everything that you could have a best friend do. When he was gone, I took the scripts, put them in a drawer and said, “That’s the end of that.”

About a year went by, and I was talking with Richard Starkings and Mark Chiarello, and they helped me think about it in a different way.
Instead of thinking about it as a story that I’m going to do without Tim, what if we did it as a story for Tim?
Mark gave me this image, which is now stuck in my head for the rest of my life, which is “Picture Tim sitting in a rocking chair on Pa Kent’s porch in Smallville and, in his lap, is this entire story collected. He’s looking through it, and it’s all these different artists that he loved to look at. He’s smiling because they did this out of love but mostly because he loved looking at their work, and they loved looking at his work.”

We went back to DC and DC laughed and said, doing a ten-part story with one artist is, at best, a nightmare. Doing one with ten artists? Go ahead and ask, but how are you going to find these people? Who is going to drop what they’re doing and do 24 original pages and the cover? The answer is everyone.

It was amazing. Everybody I talked to, I knew them and they knew me, but it wasn’t like I could pick up the phone. I knew I had Chiarello; that was the only person that I knew. We made this list and the first person I talked to was Eduardo Risso from
[the DC/Vertigo series]
100 Bullets

. I told him that I got to do this thing with Tim, but Tim can’t do it, so it’s for Tim and [he was like], I’m in.
Nobody asked what they were doing, what the project was, which characters they were doing, nothing. As soon as I said “It’s for Tim,” everyone said, we’re in. Let’s do this.

It starts off with Eduardo. Next is the Penguin, with the legendary artist Klaus Janson. The Riddler is with Mark Chiarello, doing the interiors and the colors. We have the legendary Dave Stewart doing the colors on the rest of the books. Cliff Chiang, who is a remarkable storyteller in his own right, is doing a real Robin story. Bill Sienkiewicz, who everyone said “You’re absolutely out of your mind! You want Bill to do 24 interior pages before the year 3000?!” — Bill was done before everybody. I could call the other artists and go, “Bill’s done. Where are you?” He’s doing the Joker.

Enrico Marini, who is this brilliant European artist, is doing Mr. Freeze. Dave Johnson, who we all know from his great covers but hasn’t done interior work a lot, is doing Poison Ivy. Becky Cloonan, who just wandered off with every Eisner that you can get your hands on, is doing Solomon Grundy. Chris Samnee, who every time he posts on Instagram, I’m the first guy there going “I love it so much!” is doing Catwoman. The last story is Matteo Scalera who, if you don’t know, go out and get
Batman: One Bad Day – Mister Freeze
, which is just exceptional work.

We didn’t want them to draw like Tim. We wanted them to use Tim’s designs, so it’s the Catwoman and Batman from that period. It’s an older Robin, from the special, which is now the prologue. I would say to everybody, think River Phoenix in
Stand by Me
. That’s how old he is. He’s 13. That dynamic is fun and great fun to write. Other than that, what you see is that a lot of these people have the same influences. The one that immediately comes to mind is Alex Toth.

What I said to everybody is, you got picked because Tim loved you. Use a lot of ink because there’s a lot of noir in what you’re doing. Just tell a great story, tell the best story that you can.
I don’t know how many artists were like, I’m drawing this for Tim? It just has to be better than what I’m doing. I need to go next level on this. That made me so happy, and I could see it in the pages. I’m not saying that they ever slacked before, but they had Tim on their shoulder going “Do that! That’s better!”

It’s 24 pages with no ads and back matter that Richard Starkings designed, that has an interview with each of the artists about what they meant to Tim and what Tim meant to them, and pencils. You usually have to wait until the Absolute Edition to see some of this stuff, but it’s going to be in every issue with a cardstock cover. It’s just a really beautiful story — the story, that’s on me — and comes up to what all these people have drawn. So far, I’m having a blast!

While The Long Halloween quotes The Godfather, you and Tim built a noir vision of Gotham City for these stories, evoking Humphrey Bogart’s The Big Sleep or Richard Widmark’s Pickup on South Street. What interested you about creating this Art Deco vision of Gotham and stories of Batman fighting mobsters as much as supervillains?

For me, it is my love letter to that kind of material. When Tim and I first met, you can’t really imagine two [dissimilar] people. Tim lived in Seattle and I lived in Los Angeles. He liked being by himself, and I was the guy out making movies and television shows. I can’t stop moving my hands while talking and Tim was a very gentle man, and he got along with everybody. There were certain things that he and I loved, certain comics. We’d talk about
Jack Kirby
, Jim Steranko and Neal Adams for hours. He’d talk to Chiarello about some obscure Spanish artist that did an eight-page story on the back of an album somewhere from 1953, and I’d be sitting there going “Guys, I’m here too. You can include me in the conversation,” and they’d just sort of stare at me.

Noir was something that both of us loved. To give credit where credit is due, Archie Goodwin, our original editor, saw that. It was Archie who started this madness.
It was Archie who came to us after we had done the third
Halloween
special. I thought that was it, and I was going home. He said to us, “Have you thought about doing a longer story?” and I said no, and then he said “I’ve always loved what you did with gangsters.”

I stopped, and I knew that I was being played because I love gangsters, but I had never written anything with gangsters. He had either lived in the future and read it or he was just funny to me. But then he dropped the bomb and said “I’ve spoken to Frank [Miller] and he’s not going to use any of the characters from
Year One
. Do you want the Falcone crime family?” At the time, there wasn’t a Falcone crime family —
there was only Carmine
, and I was in.

We started talking about what the story was going to be. This friendship between Batman, [Jim] Gordon, Harvey Dent, and how that was destroyed by the emergence of Two-Face was really what it was all about at the end of the day. We didn’t need more than that to keep it going. We’re both really big Beatles fans and I said to Tim, “I really think that if you take Bruce and Batman — because I really do think Bruce and Batman are two different characters — with Gordon and Harvey Dent, it really is about four men who were incredibly close and believed in something, and then it fell apart.”

I had watched this documentary on The Beatles and watched that happen and there’s something there. I don’t know what it is, but there’s something about that friendship that makes it go. This last story is the final resolution of that friendship because, at this point, Batman has already come to the conclusion that Harvey was always Two-Face, that the man that they knew was always the man that he was. Two-Face had to be let out, which is really cool, because when you think about the fact that
Bruce grew up and became Batman, and he somehow knows in his mind that he wasn’t meant to be Batman, that he was meant to be something else and then a tragedy happened — he doesn’t see that with Harvey.
He doesn’t see that Harvey was a man that had a tragedy happen to him and became Two-Face. He sees it as that this was always this person.

One of the great parts about having Robin in the story is that you have another character who never knew Harvey. He gets to ask all those hard questions to Batman, like “How come you don’t give this guy a break?” and Batman will not go there. He’s just that guy who goes “No, this is a guy who betrayed us all.” Gordon is in the middle going “I miss him,” and Batman’s attitude is “Don’t. The man that we knew is a lie.” It’s that kind of stuff.

Yes, there’ll be great action, great villains and a murder mystery that you’ll hopefully solve along the way if I leave you enough bread crumbs. It’s hard doing a murder mystery with the World’s Greatest Detective, who should’ve figured it all out in the first issue. You keep going and moving the pieces on the chessboard enough that it’s a compelling story. That’s really what’s important.

All of your major Batman stories have revolved around a sense of mystery. It’s there in Hush, The Long Halloween and Dark Victory. How difficult is it creating these mysteries, identifying the ending and reverse-engineering the story?

I’m just going to have to tell you that I love magic. If you’ve ever seen a magician pull a rabbit out of a hat, he shows you the empty hat, then he puts it down, reaches inside and pulls out a rabbit. That’s magic. When you find out there is a false bottom in the hat and the rabbit has always been there — [that] all he does is reach in, lift the false bottom, take out the rabbit, put the false bottom back down and pull it out — it’s not magic anymore. Now it’s a hat with a rabbit in it. That’s my incredibly bad metaphor for explaining to you that when I set out to tell a mystery, it’s magic.

I know the parts along the way, but don’t kid yourself. You can go back and reread The Long Halloween with this in mind. There was a point when we got to Issue #6, where I said to Tim, “Let me get this right: There’s a serial killer out there who’s killing gangsters, who don’t really know, we’re making them up as we go along. Milos, Carmine’s faithful bodyguard, gets shot on Christmas Day. Suppose people get to Issue #4 and go ‘Who cares?'” Tim was always the voice of reason, and he went “Why don’t we just let people read the story?”

I was so convinced that I hadn’t done my homework properly. The April’s Fool issue, with the Riddler guessing who is Holiday at the same time that Batman is trying to guess who Holiday is, was me saying to the reader “Hey, if you thought this [was] boring, here it is!” I don’t ever know. To me, every story, movie and teleplay that I’ve ever written, going all the way back to Teen Wolf — I sat in the theater going “I hope someone thinks this is funny. I hope someone thinks Michael J. Fox turning into a werewolf playing basketball is funny.” To my good luck, yeah, they have.

That’s not saying every single story that I’ve managed to write has worked out to the best of its ability, as many people will be happy to tell me.
But I’ve had a lot of luck with Batman and I think it really comes down to,
he’s a detective
. I have a motivation beyond the bad guys trying to take over the world.
It’s really hard to tell those stories. With Batman, if you can set up a mystery that gives him a place to go, people to talk to and a motivation along the way, that cast is just so remarkable.

I could write Gordon and his wife Barbara, whose marriage is in the toilet, and we know it’s in the toilet because in presen day, he’s not married to her anymore. I get to work with that stuff. I get to work with the idea that Gilda Dent — who, in some stories, was called Grace; that’s how well-known the character was — I got an opportunity to say, no matter what Harvey became, she loved him because she could only see the man she loved. When you have that kind of stuff, like Dick Grayson looking at Batman going “You know that I can do this. I don’t really need your help,” and Batman going “No, you can’t,” that, to me, is the stuff that makes a really cool Batman story to write. Whether or not everybody else is going to read it, we’re going to find out.

When I was doing the Red Hulk with Ed McGuinness, we’re just blowing shit up. We’re having fun and that was fun too, because it was a mystery too, where everyone was guessing
who was the Red Hulk
. It wasn’t a big mystery; there weren’t a lot of suspects. It could really only be one guy. That’s the fun of comics. I see some people do it so much better than I do, and I look at them — I’m looking at you, Tom King. I hate you so much because you’re so talented. That’s what makes comics great.

The big thing that Tim taught me and that I really admired about him was that he would look at comics as an art form that could only exist as comics. I would say ,”Don’t think it’s cool? They’re making it into movies and animated things!” and he would go “It’s a comic. That’s what it was designed to be. It allows the reader to put on their own voice.”

People wonder if Michael Keaton or
Robert Pattinson is the best Batman
. The best Batman is the one that you hear in your head when you’re reading a Batman comic.
Sometimes it is one of the guys that you’ve heard before, and sometimes it’s just a voice. That’s magic.

The other magic is you can end an issue with a gun going off and not see who it is. You spend a month wondering who got shot and what’s going on before the next issue. You can’t really do that in a movie or TV, because you have a scene that’s going to come right up. As a storyteller, it’s its own unique thing.

Batman: The Long Halloween – The Last Halloween #1 goes on sale Sept. 25, 2024 from DC Comics. The series is written by Jeph Loeb and lettered by Richard Starkings, with the first issue illustrated by Eduardo Risso and colored by Dave Stewart, with different artists for each subsequent issue.