Return to Earth B-Minus

Howdy, chums:

I’m back, after a longer-than-preferred absence, but at least I’m able to think and type, both of which would’ve been pretty easily exposed as farces if I’d tackled this sooner.

And speaking of farces, I did want to revisit last installment’s Batman pitch.

For one thing, the much better name for the pitch came to me: Batman: Year None.

(Right? Because it’s Batman and a Gotham where there’s not even like….Bruce Wayne, much less Gordon and Alfred and 1900 backflipping batkids. None of that. Ergo: Year None.)

(But also, as at a bit of meaningful gesturing toward Batman: Year One which was supervillain free, though it did such a great job with characters like Gordon and Selena and Harvey Dent.)

For another, the lovely and talented Martin Gray sent me a terrific note with an excellent point and an even better solution: I’m not sure Batman would find a readership for 3-5 years without villains and at least a few supporting characters showing up in the Batman Reborn world… but maybe the twist could be that the villains who rise to the top are the likes of the Cavalier, Nocturna and Black Spider?

This…is so good. I don’t remember how I never circled around to this but, yeah, I’d thought about exactly that solution and, even now, waver on it: having Batman villains who are very far out of the standard rotation—I’d been thinking Firefly, Killer Moth, and very specifically Black Spider, Calculator—gives a chance to reintroduce those characters and reinvigorate them. (I’d love to do something with Hush.)

But—and here’s the third reason I’m revisiting the pitch (well, maybe, the fourth if you count that I once again can’t think of another pitch?): I fucking hate The Long Halloween.

Fucking. Hate it.

I hate it so much, after reading Martin’s note, I found myself thinking, “maybe Calendar Man? I remember liking Calendar Man? And The Long Halloween is mostly Batman vs. gangsters, right? Maybe I should check that out on Hoopla and give that a re-read. Everyone praises it to the skies. Maybe i was too tough on it.”

So I checked it out on Hoopla and read it over the course of this past week.

Holy fucking shit, do I hate The Long Halloween.

If you haven’t read it, The Long Halloween is set more or less after Batman: Year One, and it starts with Jim Gordon, crusading D.A. Harvey Dent, and good ol’ Batman vowing to clean up Gotham by taking down “the Roman Empire:” the organized crime empire run by Carmine (“the Roman”) Falcone that has a seemingly unbreakable grip on the city.

But, around the time the trio make their oath, a mysterious “serial” killer called “Holiday” comes on the scene, killing members of the Falcone family and leaving holiday related trinkets at the scene of each killing. The Long Halloween takes place over the course of a year as Batman tries to stop the Holiday Killer, Dent tries to stop Falcone, and Gordon….I don’t know. Smokes?

I’m a person that doesn’t mind pastiche and analogs in my superhero fiction—in fact, I think I’d probably say I’m a big fan—so I shouldn’t be the one to complain that a lot of scenes from the Falcone family seem more than a little familiar if you’ve ever seen The Godfather. But it also seems to be the limit with which Loeb has ever thought or read about organized crime (other than even older gangster movies). Admittedly, Loeb inherited “The Roman’s” name from Miller & Mazzuchelli but the other names he comes up with on his own—Sal Maroni? Carla Viti? Milos Grappa?—had me expecting to encounter a mob fixer named Mozzarella di Buffala or a leggy goomah named Spicy Tuscan Hot Wings.

Also, while a serial killer is indeed someone who kills several people in a row, Loeb really stretches the definition by calling Holiday a serial killer: he’s only killing people in one crime organization! And he kills them on a holiday, and he leaves a holiday-related icon at the scene—there’s nothing mysterious about that! (About the only good thing I can say about the wordless sequences where Holiday—shown as little more than a pair of gloves and a gun—kills his victims is, by keeping them dialogue free and with gray washes, each one seems more like a riff on Bob Clark’s Black Christmas than anything out of The Silence of the Lambs.

(Also, why don’t these guys just go into full lockdown for each and every holiday? It’s not that hard! Despite some of the holidays threatened by the Calendar Man in his sealed-off cell in Arkham Asylum, nobody ever gets whacked on like Secretary’s Day or National Doughnut Day!)

So it’s hard to say Loeb & Sale’s The Long Halloween is ruined by bringing supervillains into it—if you ask me, it’s ruined by bringing Loeb and Sale into it—but having Batman’s rogue’s gallery brought in on the thinnest of pretenses goes on to dramatically underscore what Aristotle called “the dumbitude” of The Long Halloween: bringing in The Joker at Christmas to repeat lines from How The Grinch Stole Christmas? The Scarecrow turns up on Mother’s Day because…it was Jonathan Crane’s mother that punished Crane whenever he showed fear?

It’s weird. I’m not surprised that The Long Halloween, as dumb as it is, is widely acclaimed and a perennial best seller: it’s a big self-contained Batman mystery story with pretty art and all of Batman’s villains turn up. (I’m not gonna lie, that also describes Hush, as do a lot of the faults listed above, and I bought that sonuvabitch in singles, in trade, and in digital.)

But it’s weird to me that The Long Halloween is—if the electronc press kits are to be believed—so influential in Hollywood? The edition I read on Hoopla has a back cover blurb from Christopher Nolan; Christian Bale and (I believe) Robert Pattinson both specifically called it out as a book they kept on set to refer to; Matt Reeves mentioned it as an influence; and I wanna say James Gunn referenced it in his “hey, I’m a DC fan!” P.R. turn upon being made head of DC’s film division.

I don’t know, maybe it’s just me being of a certain age that my self-hating comics nerd peeks out. But I find myself wondering, when I finished this re-read of The Long Halloween….are these guys idiots? They should know good work; they’ve done good work! Why are they talking up a book where The Scarecrow sets a trap for Batman by having a fear-gas filled “scarecrow” of himself ride a horse out in a field near Arkham Asylum so Batman can pounce on it and trigger the gas? (How long did that horse have to gallop around around out in that field before Batman came along? What if he’d gone in a different direction?) Chris Nolan’s pull quote is something like, “‘THE LONG HALLOWEEN' is more than a comic book. It's an epic tragedy.”

I read that and I think…jesus, maybe it’s just me. I don’t know.

Anyway! I’ve made myself laugh more than a few times while writing this—nothing makes me feel more like The Simpson’s Comic Book Guy than spending 1100 words going, “You can’t call someone a serial killer if they’re just killing off members of one crime family! Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale’s The Long Halloween is a Batman story for dunces. My proposed five year story of Batman fighting crime on a planet called Earth B-Minus is clearly superior, and DC are fools and cowards for not giving me carte blanche to tell a Batman story for the ages.”

Eight more days left in this fool’s month; let’s see if I can get one more pitch out the gate before I go back to, you know, cutting and pasting lists of comics books.

Cheers,

-Jeff