The Long Halloween was, to a large extent, a mystery solved. We can quibble here and there about who committed which murder when, but for the most part, there’s little left to discover. Even the Batman’s arc in the Long Halloween saga is mostly closed, from trusting and feeling betrayed by Harvey Dent in Long Halloween to trusting again, by partnering with Robin, at the end of Dark Victory.

I was tempted to write, “In this way, Batman: The Long Halloween: The Last Halloween is not much of a mystery,” but that’s not entirely true. It is a mystery, in that things happen without immediate explanation and it’s left to the audience to figure out what’s happening. Indeed I was quite taken with the book, parceling it out over a couple of days and spending no small amount of time trying to determine the culprits.

But I was too far afield, as maybe I sometimes tend to be with mysteries, eschewing the obvious answers for something deeper, when it turns out the obvious answers are the right ones … of sorts. At its simplest, Last Halloween is not much of a mystery, a book where the guilty are exactly who you’d expect, because really this is just a coda, a place largely of final bow-taking. In its more complicated, Last Halloween doesn’t totally explain itself, so arguably there’s mystery within mystery here, either some room to debate or a rushed ending, depending on how charitable you feel.

Nor will I claim total satisfaction with Last Halloween as the closure of the characters' arcs over three volumes, though I did think writer Jeph Loeb came around to something poignant in the final pages.

[Review contains spoilers]

None of that is to overlook, of course, the effect that the death of Long Halloween artist Tim Sale had on the book. The Long Halloween Special, what became issue #0 of this collection, was written by Loeb and drawn by Sale before his passing, so obviously there was something Long Halloween-ish in the offing. Whether it all worked out the same though is another question; Last Halloween’s closing interviews suggest everything’s generally as planned, but consider me a little skeptical, especially given that Last Halloween is an uncharacteristic few issues shorter than both Long Halloween and Dark Victory.

Which is to further theorize, maybe Last Halloween didn’t end up quite the mystery it was intended to be, becoming for exterior reasons more of a coda — less a Long Halloween mystery and more of an artist jam book in tribute to Sale, connected by a Long Halloween-ish plot. Obviously this could not not be billed as a mystery, but Jeph Loeb writing a Tim Sale tribute book, even in the form of less connected “Haunted Knight” stories, still would have been something I’d buy.

In Last Halloween, Gilda Dent has escaped from an asylum, and in helping Two-Face nee Harvey Dent rescue her from the Calendar Man, Batman voices what he might have previously suspected, that Gilda was one of Long Halloween’s Holiday killers. Over the course of the next year, Holiday seemingly returns, though often wounding Gotham’s so-called “freaks” instead of killing them, with blame shifting between Harvey, Gilda, and Mario Falcone, brother of both Holiday Alberto Falcone and the Hangman Killer Sofia Falcone. The three are obvious suspects, each seen in countless conversations about vague schemes, which is why they’re so easy to dismiss (versus the Mad Hatter — count how many villains are wearing hats!).

As it turns out, they are Last Halloween’s Holidays, after all. In the end we’re given to understand a kind of weird team-up, whether Harvey and Mario as brought together by Gilda, or Harvey and Mario working toward complementary? conflicting? ends as directed again by Gilda. It seems that Gilda loves Harvey, her “Apollo,” and also that she’s having an affair with Mario; toward the end she tries to convince each that she’s pregnant with their child. But in contrast, she equally arranges for Mario to shoot Harvey and then she herself fires on Mario’s car. Gilda also arranges for the Penguin to kidnap James Gordon’s son and then frames Mario for it, and yet Mario is in on it enough to shoot the Penguin on her behalf. Gilda’s staged shootings, with help from the Calendar Man, consolidate Harvey’s army of “freaks” inside Arkham, but when the gang war finally comes, she appears to side with Mario.

The final motives, then, are not explicit, or if they were then it was over my head (who did Gordon shoot in the ruins of Mario’s house?). I recognize this is a book thematically tied to Two-Face, with dual identities built in to the mainstream superhero ethos; that Gilda might simultaneously work for and against she and her partners' best interests is not so hard to square. Which is to say again, it’s not that there’s nothing to solve; if anything, Last Halloween’s conclusion seems more ambiguous and less clear-cut than the mysteries of Long Halloween and Dark Victory. It’s just perhaps that Last Halloween is more of a “when,” “why,” and “how” mystery than it is a “who,” whereas its predecessors each gained their fame as whodunnits.

To my eye, Last Halloween rather rushes toward its conclusion. There’s a few instances in the final chapter, with art by Matteo Scalera, where characters jump from place to place between scenes (in a bunch of the final chapters, actually), which is maybe supposed to preserve certain mysteries but also seems like trimming to meet a lesser page count. Batman, Jim Gordon, and Harvey Dent end up back up on a roof together, but the real conversation about trust, betrayal, and friends who became enemies hardly gets its space, mostly given over to Harvey’s pleas that Gilda get help. Even then, Gilda’s role as Holiday is still never really acknowledged, whereas Loeb devotes two pages to a conversation between Batman and Catwoman not so different than what we’ve read elsewhere.

If anything, I thought Loeb got it right as a conclusion to the Long Halloween saga only in the final scene, with Batman, Gordon, and now Robin Dick Grayson in the triangle pose previously embodied by Batman, Gordon, and Harvey. We’re trying to graft a third act onto an arc completed 20 years previous, but if anything, we can see now that we’ve come full circle — not just that Batman is willing to entertain another partner after Harvey, but that Batman brings Robin all the way in to a new, better inner circle. It’s a book about “two faces,” but we might further look at Last Halloween as a book of parallel threes — Batman finally re-completes his triangle of trust at the same time as the teaming of Mario, Gilda, and Harvey proves that the mob and the “freaks,” so much at war in these books, were cut from the same cloth all along.

Last Halloween is visually rich, again perhaps far more important than any of the above, with the artists quite interestingly aligning to Tim Sale’s designs without trying to mimic the artist directly. Eduardo Risso follows Sale well, with thin lines and the epaulets on Robin’s cape, for instance. (I could do without multiple signed pages, though.) Always good to see Klaus Janson and Bill Sienkiewicz, of course (I was so sure the Joker was being controlled by Mad Hatter!). Cliff Chiang and Becky Cloonan bring some modernity to the art that perhaps seems farthest from Sale but still make for two attractive issues. Only Dave Johnson’s work put me too much in mind of Batman poses he’d depicted before, and Scalera’s art seemed a bit muddy for what the last chapter needed.

In reviewing that Long Halloween Special, I had wondered if with Tim Sale’s death, the “Long Halloween saga” might end unfinished. It does not, happily; I clearly don’t see Batman: The Long Halloween: The Last Halloween as the best end, but if the story was continuing, at least it got an end, and as a tribute to Sale as well. There will be deluxes and absolutes and so forth; I wish it well.

[Includes original and variant covers, interview section]