ComicsDc ComicsWith 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 everWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
ComicsDc ComicsWith 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 everWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
(Image credit: DC)
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
(Image credit: DC)
(Image credit: DC)
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.
Spoilers for Batman: Dark Victory
(Image credit: Warner Bros.)
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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It’s no accident that The Long Halloween cycle is so influential on The Batman because Matt Reeves was literally a student of Jeph Loeb’s. Reeves posted as much onX (formerly Twitter)back in 2018, noting that Loeb was one of his screenwriting teachers at USC. But funnily enough, he didn’t make the connection until he started researching for The Batman.
(Image credit: DC)
“It’s so weird because I didn’t know till I did all of this deep dive that it was literally my screenwriting teacher from USC – the person who told me that I should become a writer – Jeph Loeb, who wrote those stories,” Reeves said in an interview with EW in 2022. “He was very responsible for me pursuing that because when I went to film school, I was very set on being a director. I’d always written what I was doing as a kid and when I was making short films when I was young because I thought these are the means to get to make a movie. And I never really separated the two. And when I was in [Loeb’s] screenwriting class, he said, ‘You have to continue pursuing this because this is something I feel you can do.’ When I started going through all the comics and I saw that he’d written [them], I was like, ‘This is crazy.’ And then I loved it.”
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.
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1Nemesis review: “A magical sense of tension”
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2Arcs review: “A whole lot of game in a small package”
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5
Cobra Kai season 6, part 2 review: “Returns to the sort of hard-hitting form that made it such a fan favorite in the first place”