MYTHCOMICS: BATMAN: THE LONG HALLOWEEN (1996-97)

In contrast to the many admirers of the Loeb-Sale LONG HALLOWEEN, I didn't get much out of the collected issues after two separate readings, aside from appreciating Sale's art. I'm not sure that I realized that it was supposed to be a direct sequel to Frank Miller's celebrated BATMAN: YEAR ONE, though obviously HALLOWEEN had to occur early in Batman's career due to the absence of any members of his Bat-family. 

In this iteration Batman has just barely started to make inroads against the entrenched "Roman Empire," the reigning crime family in Gotham, represented by local godfather Carmine Falcone, aka "the Roman." The Caped Crusader has already won the confidence of police captain James Gordon, and much of the action in HALLOWEEN centers around the way Batman and Gordon also bond with D.A. Harvey Dent in their attempt to bring down criminals. Organized crime is the true foe of these do-gooders, while the notorious super-villains of Batman's mythos are regarded as "freaks," particularly by the career criminals. Batman has met most of his big-name foes at this time-- Joker, Riddler, Penguin, Scarecrow, Mad Hatter, Catwoman, and Poison Ivy-- though Loeb and Sale also make use of two lesser lights in the Bat-mythos, Calendar Man and Solomon Grundy. At this point in time, Harvey Dent has not yet undergone his transformation into Two-Face, and indeed that transformation is the culmination of HALLOWEEN's main plotline.

Still, I wasn't deeply impressed with the Loeb-Sale treatment of either the ordinary crooks or the super-crooks, nor with the retelling of Dent's transformation, or with the "serial killer" mystery that extended across all 13 issues of HALLOWEEN. Each issue represented a month in the Bat-universe, during which Batman proved unable to keep the mysterious assassin Holiday from executing at least one victim a month, always on a popular holiday. Most of Holiday's victims are also members of the Falcone crime family, and so a major part of the mystery is the attempt to determine whether the killer belongs to a competing family-- or someone who hates crime but has decided to go outside the law-- someone like Harvey Dent.

I confess that even though I'm not a great admirer of Christopher Nolan or his collaborator David Goyer, their prologue to a 2011 collection of HALLOWEEN gave me a new insight. Both filmmakers stated that the Loeb-Sale work had been a seminal influence on their first two Bat-films. Remembering how much THE DARK KNIGHT plays off of HALLOWEEN's leitmotif about "belief"-- particularly with the phrase "I believe in Harvey Dent"-- I realized that whatever I thought about the films, HALLOWEEN was about how even among good men, belief is always vulnerable to corruption.

In most Batman stories, the hero can track down any serial killer, because the murderer always conveniently leaves clues that enable the crime-fighter to track down the miscreant. HALLOWEEN goes to the other extreme. Even though Holiday leaves behind some holiday-themed token every time he (or she) kills, Batman learns nothing from the tokens, and he almost nver manages to anticipate where Holiday might strike next, despite knowing what day the assassination will take place. Holiday remains "off-camera" for most of the story, since Loeb and Sale were creating a genuine mystery, even if their denouement is somewhat ambivalent. Oddly, one of the few super-villains who has some mythic presence here is the lower-tier felon The Calendar Man. Though Julian Day is not directed involved in the Holiday killings, his obsession with seasonal occurrences gives him in HALLOWEEN a function like unto that of Hannibal Lecter in RED DRAGON. Batman consults with Calendar Man as Clarice consulted with Lecter to learn the nature of the Red Dragon-- with the main difference being that Calendar Man only provides one useful yet highly ambivalent clue, as if he were a Greek oracle dispensing problematic advice.

The other super-villains almost function as date-markers during Holiday's year-long campaign of targeted killings, and all of them are pretty routine. The Joker is crazy. Catwoman is unpredictable. Poison Ivy uses her hypnotic plants to suborn Bruce Wayne's will. Arguably none of them shine, because the focus is on Harvey Dent, whom the reader knows is destined to become Two-Face. 

None of the "ordinary crooks" in HALLOWEEN get any better treatment, despite Sale's borrowing from visual elements in THE GODFATHER. All of the hoods knocked off by Holiday are ciphers, while Loeb doesn't bring any interesting dynamics to Carmine Falcone and the various literal members of his family: wife, sons, daughter. There's a minor subplot revealing how, many years ago, Thomas Wayne saved Falcone's life, but not much comes of it.

Though no one cares about the bickering of the criminals, freakish or normal, Loeb and Sale spotlight the trials of the just at every opportunity. Dent's busy schedule as prosecutor causes him to neglect his wife Gilda, and on one occasion she's injured by a bomb intended to kill both of them. Because of Thomas Wayne's past action, Dent tries unsuccessfully to prove that Bruce Wayne has some collusion with Falcone, though of course the fighting D.A. does not know that Wayne's other identity. The troika of Batman-Gordon-Dent is strained as the first two suspect Dent of having adopted the identity of Holiday in order to murder the ganglords of Gotham. 

But before Batman and Gordon have the chance to accuse Dent, one of the crime-lords strikes a decisive blow: assailing Dent's face with acid. Crazed by pain, Dent flees to the underworld of Gotham's sewer system, where he forms an odd bond with the undead monster Solomon Grundy, simply because Dent knows the "Solomon Grundy" rhyme. And although Harvey Dent is not guilty of the Holiday murders, his ambivalence about the law's effectiveness transforms him into Two-Face. Only with the passage of a full year do Batman and Gordon finally figure out how to trap the real Holiday, and that's only with Calendar Man's help. But the damage is done. Two-Face uses Grundy to liberate the other fiends from Arkham Asylum, and though Batman manages to corral them all, he can't prevent the formerly righteous D.A. from going over the line and killing Carmine Falcone.  

Two-Face is arrested as well, but he's beyond the pale to his former friends, and they can only ask themselves if their actions were just. Loeb and Sale then throw in a last "teaser" to suggest that there's an angle to the Holiday killings that the two crime-fighters will never learn.

One podcast professed the opinion that HALLOWEEN was all about how the ordinary crooks were displaced in the Bat-mythos by the super-crooks. On the contrary, I think the diminished importance of the super-crooks' deeds in the story indicates their transitory effects on the crime scene. Yes, by the end of the story "the Roman Empire" has fallen, but every Bat-reader knows that other crime families simply filled the void in present-day Gotham. Sale's deliberately cartoon-like art frequently exaggerates the super-fiends to the point of absurdity. When Batman punches the Joker in one scene, the villain's neck stretches like the body of a jack-in-the-box. In the Penguin's brief appearance, he sports a monocle so big that no human eye-muscles could hold it, and Poison Ivy has "leaf-hair" that's longer than her entire body. Compared to the scourge of ordinary criminals and the poisonous effect they have even on righteous people, the super-fiends themselves are like the calendar's holidays: attempts to punctuate the dull round of human existence with the celebration of non-rational customs. And that is the "master thread" by which BATMAN THE LONG HALLOWEEN can be accurately read as a mythcomic.

NEAR-MYTHS: HUSH (2003), HEART OF HUSH (2008)

 

HUSH, the 2003 work by Jeph Loeb and Jim Lee, is a work I would have liked to rate as a mythcomic. It’s definitely one of the best Batman stories to have appeared within the rather limited period of the twenty-first century. Even if the story had been crap, I imagine I still would have got a buzz at seeing how Jim Lee—by no means a favorite of mine—rendered the Bat-characters with his lush, photo-realistic art. Yet Lee’s contribution is matched by that of Jeph Loeb, who spins a cool mystery involving many of Batman’s famous foes, as well as introducing a new one, the titular Hush, who may go on to classic status eventually. HUSH is certainly a much better story than Loeb’s LONG HALLOWEEN, another Bat-villain rally from about five years previous. But try though I did, I didn’t find enough of a symbolic discourse to make this a mythcomic—though there’s at least an interesting bachelor-thread relating to Batman’s alienation from all the other characters who comprise his Bat-family.

Hush makes his first appearance in the collected work’s second chapter, entitled “The Friend.” The first words of the master villain—largely responsible for the assemblage of eight Bat-villains as part of a grand anti-Batman plot—are also on the subject of friendship, quoting Aristotle: “Without friends no one would choose to live, though he had all other goods.” Hush’s true identity is a big deal in the narrative, but it’s old news now, so—

USUAL SPOILERS

Hush is actually Bruce Wayne’s childhood friend, one Thomas Elliott, a character whom Loeb created from whole cloth. I’ve seen one review that scorned the new character’s introduction as a transparent setup, but I’m more interested in whether or not Loeb succeeded in painting a good psychological picture of Elliott as more than just “a dark version of Bruce Wayne.” For the most part, Loeb succeeds in giving Elliott some psychological heft. Given that content, the mystery angle didn’t matter as much to me, not even when the character’s appearance—that of a man in a trench coat with bandages over his face-- is meant to suggest that of a more established evildoer.

Loeb and Lee model Hush’s general appearance not upon the iconic visuals of Two-Face, but upon that character’s appearance in Frank Miller’s THE DARK KNIGHT RETURNS. In that work, Two-Face’s disfigurement has been cured and he appears for the most part only a man in a coat, wearing surgical bandages over his face. Since HUSH also features an appearance of Two-Face's alter ego, attorney Harvey Dent, it seems clear that Loeb sought to trick the reader into thinking that Hush was simply a new incarnation of an old foe. Of course, had that been the case, then the writer would’ve had no reason to devote so much space to Thomas Elliott—who is apparently killed late in a late chapter, some time prior to the Big Reveal. As for Dent, he ends up being almost the only former Bat-foe who’s on Batman’s side, aside from the always mercurial Catwoman. Hush’s reasons for warring on Batman and Bruce Wayne are reasonably consistent, though they never become more interesting than the high-octane fights between the heroes—Batman, Nightwing, Tim Drake-Robin, and Huntress—and such opponents as Joker, Harley Quinn, Riddler, Poison Ivy, Killer Croc, Scarecrow, Lady Shiva, and Ra’s Al Ghul. On top of all this, Superman is also unwillingly dragooned to fight on the side of the devils, and Catwoman, despite being on the side of the angels this time, gets an intense battle with another goodguy, Huntress. To be sure, without a penciller as skilled as Lee, most of these punch-ups would have been no better than those of the average comic book.

Hush’s plan to destroy Batman fails of course, and he appears to “die” at the hands of his doppelganger Harvey Dent. Another five years later, Hush, who had made one or two intervening appearances, commanded the spotlight once more in HEART OF HUSH by writer Paul Dini and penciler Dustin Nguyen. There’s far more detail about Elliot’s background and his relationship with childhood friend Bruce Wayne, and while Catwoman once again plays a romantic role in the hero’s life, there aren’t nearly enough other villains here to qualify as a rally. Nguyen’s art is more attenuated and stylized than that of Lee, emphasizing mood rather than action, but this matches Dini’s attempt to flesh out the central villain, even expanding on the character’s repeated citations of Aristotle. Still, though HEART OF HUSH provides a literal “loss of heart” for one character, Dini doesn’t extend Hush’s potential into the realm of the mythic any more than Loeb did. Still, I certainly think the character has more potential than many other latter-day additions to the mythos.