By the time the mid-1990s rolled in, comic book fans had been hot on the trail of Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns; always seeking that next Batman read that would enrapture their pop culture senses and hopefully build up to another sophisticated rendition of the power of the original Batman. The answer came in around 1996, almost surreptitiously as the book Batman: The Long Halloween started to get dropped on the comic bookstore shelves and into our pull lists for the month. If Batman was on your list of monthly comics for the shopkeeper to set aside (pull list), then you were just about guaranteed to at least get the first issue. Who would have known that this limited series would have such a dramatic impact? From the first issue, we are enthralled by the writing brilliance of Jeph Loeb and visually mesmerized and immediately under the spell of Tim Sale’s noir artwork and design. This was no ordinary book, it exuded noir cinema; that style of dark evocative mood that often stemmed from German expressionism and made its way into the American cinematic language; it was all here in the pages of this book.

I suppose being a fan of Halloween, the holiday that is, certainly helped catch my attention to the title (smart DC, very smart)! I recall the moment like yesterday, seeing those first set of pages that ultimately ended up being the first book of a 13-part series. It had the right shades of light and an overwhelming amount of shadow (which I LOVED), and the artist was a master of where to place the camera. The work would have made John Alton proud, as it was pure film noir brilliance. Although a great deal of the characters, especially the villains in the first few books, were gangsters, Tim Sale knew how to capture a moment in time with just the right angle and pitch of the camera combined with the nearly monochromatic color palette. We received mood, shocking amounts of mood, that did not let up, nor did it for once break the proverbial “fourth wall” and imitate itself. The comic book is dark, which reminded me of the work in the animation of Batman the Animated Series. Tim Sale must have cornered the market on black ink, as the images would hide so much in the shadows that we had no safety net, nowhere to go but be immersed in the world both he and Jeph Loeb had remarkably captured. The paper DC chose to print this book made the experience so worthwhile, they went all out making sure the visceral nature of what we were to experience was lasting and something so strikingly different than what we would have seen on the comic book shelves at the time.

Murders that would appear on the major holidays, with Batman on the case chasing down a serial killer; all the while trying to weave in and out of a world where the gangsters ruled and those being executed, how shall I say, “sort of had it coming.” This was a powerful story almost shockingly so for a comic book, but with that right dose of what we wanted to feel, elevated, as we collected Batman book after Batman book. So not only did the work give us the experience of a master plot, a true murder mystery designed by Jeph Loeb’s deep commitment to what could easily rival the best Sherlock Holmes story, but he also gave us something to deliberate. Was the killer providing a service to Gotham? A harbinger of doom, or perhaps an angel of mercy for the beleaguered city? This book gave us the sophistication of writing and art at first blush, but it also gave us the foundation for a great story as the deliberation over the moral vicissitudes of the characters became the focal point. If the organized crime component is ruinous to the city of Gotham, then perhaps the emergence of this denizen of the dark was a necessity. The result of the Holiday killer is even more potent as this becomes the story where Batman tales once steeped in crime fiction ultimately see their greatest triumph with the advent of the Supervillain. It’s a story of Harvey Dent before the transformation, it’s a story of the rogues emerging, but it’s also a story that left us some near 25 years later a road map on how to make a great book.

The documentary film I produced with Warner Bros. for Batman: The Long Halloween Deluxe Edition titled “Evolution of Evil,” was intended to capture some of these more vexing questions which dominated the world of Gotham. The exploration led my team and I on a remarkable journey of finding what causes these harbingers of doom to appear in our society and how the arts in this case helped capture that with one of the most intriguing stories that have inspired many writers and in the notable case of Christopher Nolan, with the film The Dark Knight. To know a man is to understand the depth of his fear, so perhaps although Harvey Dent makes that ultimate sacrifice of half his face and body emerging as a Promethean horror, there his “half-death” serves as the conduit between the old world and the new, from the one where Gotham was run by the likes of the Falcone family; gangsters throughout, to the one run by the Supervillain where Two-Face, The Joker, Poison Ivy, among myriad others become the elite that casts Batman into his new era of the story. Sometimes a holiday is more profound than a date on a calendar. I hope you enjoy our film.

Alex Gray

studiowestpictures.com

The documentary “Evolution of Evil” is available on the Deluxe Edition of Batman: The Long Halloween, available in 4K, Blu-ray, and digital.

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Batman images copyright DC Entertainment.