Synopsis: Christmas. St. Patrick’s Day. Easter. As the calendar’s days stack up, so do the bodies littered in the streets of Gotham City. A murderer is loose, killing only on holidays. The only man that can stop this fiend? The Dark Knight. In a mystery taking place during Batman’s early days of crime-fighting, Batman: The Long Halloween is one of the greatest Dark Knight stories ever told.

Working with District Attorney Harvey Dent and Lieutenant James Gordon, Batman races against the calendar as he tries to discover who Holiday is before he claims his next victim each month. A mystery that has the reader continually guessing the identity of the killer, this story also ties into the events that transform Harvey Dent into Batman’s deadly enemy, Two-Face.

Review: I try to post a review once a week, usually every weekend because that’s when I have more time. When I saw the date on the calendar and when it fell in the week, the question of what to write about was easily answered.

First though, I want to talk about something and this is a good excuse to do so. I have some stated goals around this crime comics project and I have some unstated ones too. If you search for crime comics you can find articles, listicles, and other round-ups. If you read enough of them three things become clear. The first is that the same small group of titles get mentioned a lot. The second is that Brubaker’s Criminal series dominates the conversation, and finally, it doesn’t take long for superhero comics to get mentioned (the idea being that superheros are crime fighters which makes those books crime. I disagree.)

One of the things I hope to do with this project is to talk about crime comics outside of that cluster of books that always get mentioned, to try and crack the surface and dig deeper. And if that means I don’t cover as many Brubaker books, or do a deep dive on Batman, it’s only because so many sites already do.

In my opinion, when discussing crime comics, there should be a lot of books recommended before even considering getting to a superhero comic. That’s roughly the space I try to operate in. The field is big and and there’s lot of good straight up crime fiction in it. So, after nearly 100 crime comics reviewed here, not including my Best of 2024 and Best of 2025 lists, and simply because of the luck of the draw, let’s finally bring Batman into the crime comics conversation. I think I’ll probably be returning to the subject of Batman at least once more at a later time because there are some good crime comics there.

The Long Halloween opens with a direct reference to the opening scene of The Godfather. In the Godfather, Bonasera the undertaker stands before Don Vito on the day of his daughter’s wedding and opens his appeal to the Don with “I believe in America.” The Long Halloween opens with Bruce Wayne standing before Carmine Falcone on the day of his nephew’s wedding saying “I believe in Gotham City”. You won’t have to look hard to find some other references to Godfather from the wedding itself to someone taking down the plates of the cars parked outside.

“…there I was stuck with this black-and-white dream of a Gotham City that was controlled by Guys with guns, Dolls with lipstick, and Shadows who had shadows.” — Jeph Loeb

I’m not a Batman expert but the better Batman stories, as far as crime fiction goes, are grounded, feature the mob and Jim Gordon, and often take place in the earlier stages of Batman lore. The Long Halloween is a kind of crime fiction saga, taking place over the course of a year, that is set in a period of transition for Gotham. Gotham is still rooted in the old villain ways and organized crime runs the city but something is happening and it’s moving towards super villains and costumed villains.

Look, The Long Halloween is considered a classic for a reason and I’m just firing off a quick post. There’s a lot of great stuff here and if you’ve never read it, you should.

Highly recommended