Interviewing Jeph Loeb is perhaps like working with Batman: you mostly stay out of the way and hope you learn a thing or two.
But it’s not about control for Loeb when talking about comics. He’s just this deeply and unwaveringly passionate man — especially when it has to do with his friend and long-time collaborator Tim Sale. And given the legacy of the Sale-Loeb team, how could anyone not be practically ecstatic every time? The pair are, of course, best known for The Long Halloween saga, which includes the 1996 original series, 1999’s Dark Victory, 2004’s Catwoman: When in Rome, and three Halloween specials.
The last such Halloween special came in 2021, and was meant as a kind of warm-up for a final phase of this near-30-year saga.
“It was always intended to be the prologue for a much longer story,” said Loeb. “It was a way for us to get the rust out of the pipes and work together again. I’d been running Marvel Television, and so it was time for me to come back.”
(Oh, and if you’re wondering how all of this took place on one Halloween, here’s Loeb’s definitive response: “I let the time wardens in continuity figure that out.”)
While DC Comics seemed to have been initially hesitant about the prospects of another Loeb-Sale Halloween project, there was no denying it’s final impact. Batman: The Last Halloween special built upon the story as much as it sparked something entirely new.
“Tim and I, we spoke basically everyday, we worked out this 10-part murder mystery that felt like the proper summing up of everything that we had created,” said Loeb. “And we explained all that to DC, and they said, ‘Well, let’s see how (the special) does, and then let’s talk about it.’ And then it came out, and immediately they were like, ‘OK, you’ve got to get started.’
While Loeb says that Sale did lay out the first three pages of what would become Batman: The Long Halloween – The Last Halloween, he never finished anything else for the project by the time he passed in June 2022 at the age of 66.
“I lost my friend. I lost my partner. I lost my storyteller,” said Loeb.”I said, ‘I’m not doing this,’ and I put it in a drawer. I forgot about it.”
Issue #2 variant cover by Klaus Janson. Courtesy of DC Comics.
But then, something wonderful happened: Sale’s friends and other collaborators/colleagues stepped in to help Loeb get The Last Halloween across the finish line.
“About a year went by and I was talking to Richard Starkings, who’s our letterer and designer and has really been with us from the beginning and in a lot of ways is our inspiration, and Mark Chiarello, who was our editor on Dark Victory and a really close friend of Tim’s,” said Loeb. “And they started to get me to think about this as, instead of doing a project without Tim, what if we did a project for Tim? What if we made this into a tribute to Tim?”
But it wasn’t just motivation that Chiarello offered: it was this glorious mental image/story that helped Loeb come to terms with why this book simply had to be.
“Mark gave me this image, which is still stuck in my head, which is what if picture Tim sitting in a rocking chair on Pa Kent’s farm in mythological Smallville as opposed to the real Smallville,” said Loeb. “He’s got the whole thing collected, and he’s looking through every single page and he’s smiling because all of the artists that came together to do this are people that inspired him.”
But how do you replace an iconic artist like Sale? You don’t, actually.
“It wasn’t a situation where I wanted people who could draw like Tim,” said Loeb. “I wanted people that Tim used to talk about all the time and go, ‘Have you seen this? This guy’s cool.’”
Loeb added, “I didn’t know any of them personally, but we put a list together and DC said, ‘Yeah, you’re not going to get these people.’ I would start the conversation, ‘Hey, I know you’re busy, I don’t know whether or not you have time to do 24 original pages, but it’s for Tim.’ They’d go, ‘Stop.’ None of them knew the story or the character or any of those things.”
And The Last Halloween is packed with great artistic talent, many of who are peers of Sale or learned from him along the way.
“So it starts off with Eduardo Risso, from 100 Bullets, and then the legendary Klaus Jansen and then Mark Chiarello doing interiors and his own colors,” said Loeb. “I should say that Dave Stewart is coloring the rest of the book. He’s legendary himself. Cliff Chiang is just a brilliant storyteller. Bill Sienkiewicz is doing 24 original interior pages and everyone was saying to us, ‘He’ll never finish it in time.’ And I was like, ‘He’s done. Unlike the rest of you.’”
Loeb added, “Enrico Marini is this amazing European artist that Tim loved, and Dave Johnson, who again hardly ever does interior work, but he’s in there. Becky Cloonan, who literally just walked off with every Eisner known to man…she was really close with Tim. Chris Samnee, who every single time he posts on Instagram, I’m like, ‘I love this guy.’ Matteo Scalera, who was my first and only choice for the last issue because I knew that there were going to be I don’t know how many characters in that story and I needed somebody who could handle that weight.”
Issue #3 variant cover by Mark Chiarello. Courtesy of DC Comics.
While not everyone Loeb had reached out to had the time required to handle one of the 10 issues, they still found other ways to contribute.
“And then this last group were people that really wanted to be involved and really wanted to send a love letter, but for one reason or another maybe couldn’t do 24 pages,” said Loeb. “And so that group is what I call the ‘superstar tribute covers.’ They were from people that loved Tim and wanted to do that. And so we start off with this guy Jim Lee and J. Scott Campbell and Arthur Adams and Ian Churchill and Rob Liefeld, who is doing his first Batman cover. And then Joyce Chin and Cully Hamner and Brian Stelfreeze. Juanjo Guarnido, who does Blacksad and hardly ever does covers for somebody else. He did this beautiful painted Batman and Catwoman cover. And then we finished with the legendary Adam Hughes.”
Oh, but wait, there’s even more.
“And then, on top of that, all of the (interior) artists are doing a mugshot cover,” said Loeb. “Klaus Janson’s second cover is The Penguin holding the tablet, and it’s a mugshot. And so the readers get all of these mugshots that they can put together in this cool thing. We’re getting the next level of some of these people’s work. Not that they aren’t brilliant all the time. But there’s a time to step up. You got to bring it, and they all brought it.”
Still want or need even more? Sure thing.
“One of things that’s a lot of fun about the book is that it’s a 24-page story, but it also has an additional 10 pages because there’s no ads. And in those last 10 pages, there’s an interview with each of the artists being asked what it was like to work with Tim or how they knew Tim and what it was like to work on this. And then there’s pencil pages. And in some cases, there were pages that they drew and then threw out and did something else because they thought this works better.”
And as if The Last Halloween wasn’t already unbelievably and utterly jam-packed enough, there’s one more gem from this book.
“The real gift is that we found 10 original pieces of artwork that no one has ever seen that Tim did of Batman,” said Loeb. “So that’s the A cover.”
Given the sheer artistic talent attached to The Last Halloween, you’d think it was mostly a showcase for these creators. And you’d be mostly, maybe even partially, right. Really, it’s complicated.
“And so the idea is for people to really have a chance to see how much people loved Tim and hopefully get caught up in a story that has a murder-mystery that’s equally compelling to the other stories that we told and also the relationship between Batman and Robin and obviously Two-Face and Gilda. Plus, Commissioner Gordon has a very emotional story throughout all of it,” said Loeb. “And so it’s really a handsome package. I hate to make it sound like that. I think of it more like a handsome gift, a love letter to Tim and to the fans to say thank you for being part of this Long Halloween saga.”
Issue #4 variant cover by Cliff Chiang. Courtesy of DC Comics.
Loeb added, “I think all the stories that we did together are emotional, and I think that that’s important. And it’s important to the artists that I’ve worked with. But I think at the end of the day, the real issue is that it’s part of a saga. It needs to feel like it’s another piece in The Long Halloween story. So it is a true murder mystery adventure Batman story. It just happens to be drawn by 10 different artists, all of whom loved Tim. And all of whom have told me about the pressure that they feel that they want it to be something that he would have loved.”
It’s a process that, to an extent, has been a little up in the air. While Loeb and Sale did work out the actual story beforehand, that doesn’t mean changes still weren’t made or otherwise necessary.
“I’m pretty much following that outline as to where we go,” said Loeb. “There are some times when I’m working with somebody that wasn’t Tim that I may change the setting. And that’s super cool to me because it brings a new element into it.”
Really, it’s a great chance for Loeb to lean into how he approaches collaboration in comics, and the important of balancing these very different artists/creators.
“Writers get asked who are (you) writing for? A lot of them answer that they write for themselves, and that they hope that the artist then captures their vision,” said Loeb. “Screenwriters do that a lot, too, where they’re writing for themselves and the director captures their vision. And a lot of writers say that they write for fans. And I think that’s great, too. I’ve always written for the artist because of my background in film and television; I always wrote for the actor or I wrote for the director.”
Loeb added, “I would not tell the same Batman story for Tim that I would tell for Jim Lee. They have a different tone and feeling. But the people that all agreed to be part of this, all had the same kind of inspirations that Tim had. A lot of what Tim and I would work on together, there’s lots of film and noir, and there’s a lot of other things like music that we both agreed on.”
But as he got further into the process of crafting The Last Halloween, Loeb discovered just how much this gaggle of artists really was aligned with Sale and his artistic efforts.
“So when I started getting to know these people, I was amazed by the number of them that would go, ‘Oh yeah, Tim and I talked about that, and we love that part of it,’” said Loeb.
But even if the art and the spirit of Sale is very much the focus, Loeb still uses The Long Halloween to build on this very much living story. The Last Halloween is, in a rather important way, about correcting the record.
“People ask me, ‘What’s the difference,” says Loeb of the various chapters of Long Halloween. “The first one was how the freaks took Gotham City away from organized crimes. The last one is this is organized crime saying, ‘Not so fast.’ And what happened to the Maroni family? In the same way that everyone knows my love with The Godfather, you do finally get to find out what happened to the Corleone family and why it doesn’t exist today. I wanted to be able to say, ‘This is why there are crime families that are in Gotham City still, but there’ll never be anything as great as the Falcone Empire.”
Issue #1 variant cover by Eduardo Risso. Courtesy of DC Comics.
There’s more still. I mentioned already that some folks might want to read to figure out the true mystery of the Holiday Killer (who was central in The Long Halloween and Dark Victory). If you’re hoping for a similar “solution,” your payoff may be a little more involved.
“I have always said that any of the mysteries there are solved because I’ve had enough people over the years say to me, ‘This is what happened.’ And so it’s there,” said Loeb. “But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t people out there that are going, ‘I don’t know what happened.’ I love it. And I think that there will be some clarity to things that maybe weren’t as clear.”
He added, “Like Catwoman: When in Rome is not as well known as the other two. There are things that happen specifically in that book that were always going to play a big part in terms of the future of Gotham City — most of which is that Catwoman got away with it. And so that has to be addressed. Those are things that I wanted to be able to look at.”
There’s also the fact that we know some things without having read, and somethings remain unknown, and that might further complicate any actual reveals.
“But, by the same token, I think it’s just as important to focus…we know in the future what happens to James Gordon and Barbara Gordon. And what happened to that marriage and those kinds of things,” said Loeb. “And what happened to Gilda in terms of the story, because she did mostly vanish from continuity. Like, what happened along the way? I don’t want to give anything away, but those are some of the mysteries that will be told and unfolded and hopefully will help people.”
While The Last Halloween is meant to be just that, I nonetheless approach the idea of even more stories coming down the load. Maybe Loeb passes this on to other creators given how much he’s opened up this chapter to so many talented folks. That just gets him going on about the larger legacy of his and Sale’s noir-y baby.
“The fact that Chris Nolan and Matt Reeves and the (DC/Warner Bros.) animation department, they’ve all been in there grabbing pieces of it and having all of that inspire them. But if what this does is one young fan out there says,’I want to be an artist. I want to be a writer,’ that’s the bigger gift then, ‘I want to continue telling stories about The Long Halloween.’ Like, go make your own saga. It’ll be awesome. I would love to see someone say, ‘I was reading all those books and I thought I had this great idea and the next thing I know, this is where we are.’”
At the same time, though, Loeb is aware of the nature of this entire story, and how there’s all these ways to read and engage with it. That alone, it seems, could keep the story going in new ways or understandings.
“I’ve spent a lot of time talking about how it’s the end of a saga, but it is a story that you could pick up, and with a little bit of help reading it, you could go, ‘Oh, this is what it is,’” said Loeb. “It does stand out in the same way that, even though Dark Victory picks up really right after what happened at the end of The Long Halloween, you could read Dark Victory and go, ‘Oh, this is Robin’s origin.’ It really doesn’t have anything to do with The Long Halloween. And I think that’s part of the gift of being able to do this story — I get to count them as six different stories. This is the end of all of that put together.”
Issue #1 main cover by Tim Sale. Courtesy of DC Comics.
Inevitably, Loeb sees The Last Halloween as “a period at the end of the sentence.” A sentence that doesn’t technically begin until folks have their hands on issue #1. That’s why Loeb is willing to talk to anyone (with heaps of other interviews conducted that very same day day) with such gusto and passion. For him, The Last Halloween is not just a story, part of a rich comics legacy, another great chapter in Bat-lore, or something deeply beloved by fans. It’s this living, breathing celebration of life, art, and friendship.
“I just want to get this in as many hands as we possibly can so that people can not just enjoy The Last Halloween, but enjoy all of the works that Tim Sale did and how brilliant he was and what he did for the world,” said Loeb. “Sometimes I think the story of making it is greater than the story I’m writing.”
