Only three weeks ago, we got the penultimate chapter of “The Last Halloween,” and today we get the finale. It’s an unheard-of release schedule, but I’m thankful to DC Comics for wrapping up this series right in time for Halloween. This final chapter has a war on its hands. On one side, we have the Falcone family, along with soldiers from Italy, and on the other, they’re fighting Two-Face and Batman’s rogues gallery. In between are Batman, Robin, and Gordon, who aim to minimize casualties. It’s a conflict with a resolution, but has this series paced things from a trot to a sprint too quickly?
Guest artist Matteo Scalera joins Batman: The Long Halloween – The Last Halloween #10, who delivered one of the best Batman comics in the last five years. There are a lot of great visual moments in this issue, thanks to Scalera, from the montage of the armies facing one another to Robin looking quite cool on his new motorcycle. There’s a lot of chaos in the war in the first half, with many confrontations, and Scalera keeps it all making sense and looking sharp. Nobody will be complaining about the action.
The second half of the issue slows down a bit to allow for clue-finding and for characters to show their true selves. That includes Two-Face, who claims Harvey is long gone, but what if he’s faced with his wife being threatened? Catwoman is also pressed to make a choice, which culminates in a satisfying conversation with Batman in the closing pages.
Guns. Lots of guns.
Credit: DC Comics
Unfortunately, with so many direct confrontations in a single issue, the larger mystery can’t really breathe. Take, for instance, Penguin, who pops into this story seemingly to reference that he kidnapped Gordon’s baby. Did he really need to be in this issue as some kind of soldier, an unlikely thing for a main villain to do? Joker is also in the scrum, as if to show Robin can be Batman’s right-hand man, but it’s far too conveniently fit into things.
Stuffed into the issue is the notion that by simply being Batman, the villains rear their heads. Writer Jeph Loeb makes an attempt to prove that’s not true, though he does make the case that Catwoman certainly was inspired by Batman to do her costumed thing. It’s a layer that feels wholly apart from the ongoing mystery involving the Falcones.
Batman: The Last Halloween #10 ends the series with explosive action and emotional weight, beautifully rendered by Matteo Scalera, but its ambition slightly outweighs its clarity. While the finale delivers on thrills and Halloween-timed drama, it sacrifices some of the nuance and mystery that made earlier chapters shine.
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