There was a lot of excited discussion on the
comics site (including us on our FPI blog) when Tim Sale announced Long Halloween was getting the Absolute
treatment on his forums. In terms of modern Batman tales this is one of the
ones which got me back into thing, using Miller’s excellent Year One as a launch pad effectively,
taking us through early years of the Dark Knight, in this case both Bruce Wayne
and Batman taking on Gotham’s top crime family while a serial killer called
Holiday murders on, well, you can guess it is on holidays.
The relationship between a young Batman,
Detective Jim Gordon and eager
District Attorney Harvey Dent gives us some great drama and we also get to see
the effect of the lives they lead on their families. Its great early years
material and also a damned good bit of crime fiction from Jeph Loeb’s pen to
boot with some interesting stings in the tale. Jeph and Tim are both damned
good comics creators in their own right, but when they work together,
especially here on Batman, they definitely become more than the sum of their
parts and offer us up some comics magic.
This volume includes a host of extras, including an interview with Loeb and Sale, a section on the Long Halloween action figure line, and a look at the series proposal, plus sketches by Sale. Also, this edition will feature a 4-page sequence cut from the original miniseries and previously released only in script/breakdown format. It looks as
if we can also look forward to the other two entries which followed this powerhouse,
Batman:
Dark Victory and Catwoman:
When in Rome, to join Long Halloween
in the Absolute range at a later date (alas together they are just too darned
big for a single edition, but hey, that means we have more to look forward
to!).
DC, hardback in slipcase, 400 pages,
published April 2007
Login
Register
Shopping Cart
Checkout
