Somebody Else's Nimrod

Batman: The Long Halloween

This trade, written by Jeph Loeb and pencilled by Tim Sale, retells the origin of Two-Face over a year fairly early in Batman's career, when every holiday brings a new murder by the serial killer called Holiday. Now, origin stories can be tricky. It's never easy to explain how an otherwise ordinary citizen can wake up one morning and declare, "Today, I am going to put on a goofy costume and go fight/commit crime!" Long Halloween draws this process out, suggesting that Harvey Dent (later Two-Face) cracks under the relentless pressure of the year and his frustration in dealing with the Gotham Mob. Unfortunately, it's just not enough Harvey's story for this to work; it's Batman's, with occasional peeks in on Harvey to set up the progression. We don't get a strong sense of Harvey's personality before the year starts and we especially don't get enough of a sense of his relationship with Bruce and/or Batman, though we're supposed to gather it was a good friendship. There's enough to evoke momentary flashes of sympathy, but not enough to sustain a whole book. If Two-Face were a new villain, this might work as a way of building suspense, but we know what's going to happen to Harvey. All the interest lies in the how, and how that affects those around them. It weirds me out to say that I found a Loeb plot more solidly conceived than Loeb character work (the mystery isn't brilliant, but it basically works, and the pacing is good), but there it is.

Tim Sale's art here is beloved by many with taste, and I admit I have idiosyncratic and not-fully-formed standards for comics art, but I had mixed reactions to it. I thought it worked well for the many mobsters--it conveys the sort of pugnacious solidity of the women particularly effectively, and the weaselliness of the minor corrupt characters--but not for many of the main characters. Especially not Selena, who looks like a jumped-up Jersey girl with a bad wave rather than at all glamorous and whose costume looks more chipmunky than catlike (most cats don't have round ears). Harvey seems half-grotesque, half-decayed, even at the beginning of the year--not at all "Apollo" the handsome, crusading DA--and Bruce really lacks those firm lines that are essential to the character for me. The conception of Ivy (radically different from the Dini/Timm style) was pretty nifty, though. There's a general atmosphere of lushness, fever, and organic decay which is (at least in my experience) an unusual approach to take to Gotham, so it's at least worth looking at.

Two-Face, as a villain, is fairly repetitive and tedious unless well-handled, but I believe there's a really good Harvey Dent story waiting to be told. Alas, this isn't quite it.