It’s taken over twenty years, but the Calendar Man finally exerts his revenge. Frustrated by wannabes stealing his schtick in The Long Halloween, Julian Day unleashes the cult of Calendar Man upon Batman, Gotham City and Harvey Dent. Kidnapping Harvey’s wife – the long-suffering Gilda Dent – Calendar Man is out to prove himself a force to be reckoned with.
Acclaimed writer-and-artist team Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale return to the Batman of The Long Halloween and Dark Victory in this one-shot special. Set not long after the events of Dark Victory, it finds Batman and Gordon still coming to come to terms with the loss of their friend and ally – having fully embraced his dark, murderous side as Two-Face. Gordon hopes that Dent can be redeemed; Batman seems certain that he can’t. As Calendar Man embarks on his bloody vengeance trip, Batman is forced into a partnership with Two-Face. Can Gotham’s former District Attorney prove the Dark Knight wrong, or is Harvey Dent lost for good?
Compared to the sprawling mysteries of The Long Halloween and Dark Victory, The Long Halloween Special is slight and snappy. But, as Loeb and Sale proved with their anthology book Haunted Knight, the pair don’t need the biggest canvas to work their magic. Reading The Long Halloween Special feels as though no time has passed at all, and Sale’s art is as gorgeously atmospheric as ever. Brennan Wagner’s colours are rich and deep; Richard Starkings’s lettering crisp and clean. Sale’s Robin looks a little odd, but his Batman and Two-Face have rarely looked better. Loeb also struggles to find something for Robin to do – settling on an oddly goofy subplot with a shoehorned-in ‘Batgirl’. Otherwise, however, this slots into the overarching, established story without missing a beat.
No mere cash-in this, The Long Halloween Special is a very welcome return to Loeb and Sale’s vision of Gotham. It’s a slick, assured sequel, picking up twenty-plus-year-old plot threads, while also tugging loose some intriguing new ones of its own. For fans of The Long Halloween new and old, it’s a real treat.
