In the latest Comic Book Legends Revealed, see how a missing page skewed how readers read Batman: The Long Halloween

Welcome to Comic Book Legends Revealed! This is the eight hundred and sixty-fifth installment where we examine three comic book legends and determine whether they are true or false. As usual, there will be three posts, one for each of the three legends. Click here for the first legend in this all-Batman installment of legends. Click here for part two of this all-Batman installment of legends.

NOTE: If my Twitter page hits 5,000 followers, I'll do a bonus edition of Comic Book Legends Revealed that week. Great deal, right? So go follow my Twitter page, Brian_Cronin!

COMIC LEGEND:

Alberto Falcone's "body" was originally supposed to appear in Batman: The Long Halloween.

STATUS:

True

Batman: The Long Halloween was a year-long series by Jeph Loeb and the late, great Tim Sale that saw Gotham City caught in the grip of the so-called Holiday killer, who, well, you know, killed people on holidays, like these guys getting killed on Valentine's Day...

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and the Holiday killer then left behind a token symbolizing the holiday in question...

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RELATED: See Alan Moore's Surprising First Published Batman Story

HOW WAS ALBERTO FALCONE WRITTEN OFF AS A SUSPECT?

One of the main suspects in Batman: The Long Halloween was Alberto Falcone, the seeming nebbishly son of gangster, Carmine Falcone. However, in the fourth issue, one of the prime suspects seemed to be taken off of the game board when Falcone appeared to be killed...

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And then his body fell from the boat on New Year's Eve...

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Batman confronts Falcone at the grave of his son in the next issue...

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In Batman: The Long Halloween #10, the Gotham City coroner is murdered...

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In the next issue, Alberto Falcone's aunt is investigating the Coroner's office when she, too, is murdered...

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This, of course, was part of covering up the fact that Alberto Falcon was actually alive! He had faked his death!

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Whether Alberto really was the only Holiday killer in the comic (or if perhaps there were MULTIPLE Holiday killers), that's a whole other story, but the main thing is that one of the parts of the plot that people clung to upon still thinking that Alberto was the killer is that when he was "killed," there was no body! When Wizard made a list of suspects, they included Alberto and specifically mentioned the lack of a body. The funny thing, though, is that the lack of a body was not originally intended!

RELATED:Did Death in the Family Nearly Have Joker Reveal He Knew Batman's Secret Identity?

WAS THERE ORIGINALLY GOING TO BE A BODY IN LONG HALLOWEEN?

In the trade paperback collection of Batman: The Long Halloween, there is a page where Alberto's body WAS found! Obviously, it wasn't actually Alberto (and the coroner knew that, which is why Alberto had to kill him), but there WAS a body, as Loeb and Sale clearly DID anticipate that people would be asking that question about the lack of a body. The page that Sale drew with the body just happened to not make its way into the published comic book...

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It's interesting to see that there were pages like that that did not make it into the finished comic book. I would have thought that Sale wouldn't have gone through the effort of drawing a page if it wasn't definitely going to make it into the finished comic book, as this isn't like a sitcom, where you film X and cut it down for the final product. Here, he had to do extra work for it to just not be used.

CHECK OUT A TV LEGENDS REVEALED!

In the latest TV Legends Revealed - Find out whether a feud between Jennifer Aniston and Reese Witherspoon forced Friends to introduce another sister of Rachel's for the show.

MORE LEGENDS STUFF!

OK, that's it for this installment!

Thanks to Brandon Hanvey for the Comic Book Legends Revealed logo, which I don't even actually anymore, but I used it for years and you still see it when you see my old columns, so it's fair enough to still thank him, I think.

Feel free (heck, I implore you!) to write in with your suggestions for future installments! My e-mail address is cronb01@aol.com. And my Twitter feed is http://twitter.com/brian_cronin, so you can ask me legends there, as well! Also, if you have a correction or a comment, feel free to also e-mail me. CBR sometimes e-mails me with e-mails they get about CBLR and that's fair enough, but the quickest way to get a correction through is to just e-mail me directly, honest. I don't mind corrections. Always best to get things accurate!

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