A SNEAK PEEK at Issue #10, by Jeph Loeb, Matteo Scalera, Dave Stewart and Richard Starkings…
Batman: The Long Halloween — The Last Halloween #10 — the limited series’ last issue — is out Wednesday and it continues its run of marvelous art by an all-star cast of illustrators, such as Mark Chiarello, Chris Samnee, Bill Sienkiewicz and Eduardo Risso, paying tribute to the late Tim Sale.
Line artist Matteo Scalera has the honors of closing things out with writer Jeph Loeb, colorist Dave Stewart and letterer Richard Starkings, and this SNEAK PEEK gives you a brilliant tableau of Gotham City’s maddest and baddest villains.
Dig this:
Tim Sale main cover
Scalera variant
Adam Hughes variant
David Finch Variant
Between this and Batman & Robin: Year One, which also ends this week, it’s been great having so much classic Dynamic Duo.
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MORE
— Holy Adam West! BATMAN & ROBIN: YEAR ONE #12 Brings You… a BAT-CLIMB! Click here.
— The ULTIMATE BATMAN READING AND VIEWING GUIDE. Click here.
October 28, 2025
Has anyone ever done a deep, meaningful retrospective of what’s now a Loeb/Sale quadrology? (Caveat: I know people lump “Haunted Knight” into the Long Halloween saga, but those stories are really three unrelated stories under the umbrella of Legends of the Dark Knight being very, very apocryphal to any Batman continuity.)
I revisit the story annually. The resolution of Holiday’s identity(ies?) remains unsatisfying if only because we never get the backstory explaining who was which Holiday killer in which months. There’s 13 killings; we only have a confirmed killer for two of them. The backstory of who did what, how they did it, and who knew what has never been addressed.
There’s speculation that the ending had to be switched at the last minute because Wizard magazine spoiled the original ending very early into the story. (The clues were there, they put them together…so either they picked up on a massive red herring or they really did figure out an obvious solve that had to be changed.) The animated film version came up with an ending that supplied the motive and the explanation and removed the red herring villain. Still: I would like to know what really happened here by the authors’ intent.