The Ending of Long Halloween Never Changed During the Writing Process

In the latest Comic Book Legends Revealed, discover whether the ending of The Long Halloween was changed after Wizard guessed the original ending

Welcome to Comic Book Legends Revealed! This is the eight hundred and thirty-ninth 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.

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:

Jeph Loeb changed the ending of The Long Halloween after Wizard correctly guessed the original ending.

STATUS:

False

Batman: The Long Halloween was an excellent maxi-series by Jeph Loeb, Tim Sale, Gregory Wright and Richard Starkings that came out over the course of a year in 1996-97, as a brilliant follow-up to the previous Halloween annual one-shots that Loeb and Sale had been doing for DC in the years leading up to The Long Halloween.

The overarching theme of the series, which set in the early days of Batman, before Gotham City was deluged with costumed criminals, and it seemed like Batman "only" had to deal with organized crime (and District Attorney Harvey Dent was working with Batman and Captain James Gordon to take crime down) was that there was a mysterious serial killer called Holiday who was, well, you know, killing people serially...

In the final issue of the series, it was revealed that Holiday was Alberto Falcone, the nebbish son of Carmine Falcone who had seemingly been killed by Holiday himself earlier in the series, but he had faked his own death...

However, Harvey Dent, who had become the villainous Two-Face after his face was heavily scarred by acid, revealed that there were TWO Holiday Killers...

and the end of the issue seems to imply that Dent's wife, Gilda Dent, was the other Holiday killer...

It's a fantastic ending, especially because it is STILL so mysterious. If you want things wrapped up in a neat bow, then Alberto and Gilda were the killers, but it could be much more intriguing than that. WERE there really two killers? Was Gilda telling the truth? Was Harvey one of the killers? Loeb has always held to his conviction of keeping the ending a mystery, in the sense that he's not going to explain it further than what appears on the pages by Sale. Which I think is really cool.

However, over the years, there have been murmurs that the ending was not the ORIGINAL ending of the series (reader Adrian M. specifically asked me about it a while back) and that this two killer ending was an attempt to change things on the fly.

As I discussed in one of my very first Comic Book Legends Revealed (just shy of...seventeen years ago?!? That can't be right, can it?), there is certainly precedence for this sort of thing, as DC changed the ending of its 1991 crossover, Armageddon 2001 when the original ending leaked and suddenly Hawk of Hawk and Dove turned out to be the villainous Monarch instead of the original reveal of Captain Atom as the Monarch (Barbara Kesel, writer of Hawk and Dove's comic book series, was obviously not thrilled with said twist, noting at the time, "If you've ever pitied anyone, pity Jonathan Peterson, the poor person who had to give me the news. I wasn't pleased, and wasn't shy about sharing. If there's anything I hate with a passion, it's characters behaving out of character, especially when it involves a smart woman being stupid for no reason. H&D becoming Monarch could have been a clever idea: if they BOTH became the character, their innately opposite natures could explain a schizophrenic villain. As it was... it was a last-minute fix that sucked."

In fact, this sort of thing happens SO often I've even come up with my own "Cronin Theory of Pop Culture" about it, namely "Don't Compete With Your Own Viewers/Readers Over Twists and Mysteries." In other words, if people figure out your twists and/our mystery reveal, that's OKAY! You don't need to change things!

In this legend, the story comes down to whether a Wizard article in Wizard #71 was responsible for changing the ending of the event. The article, which feature an excellent original Tim Sale piece of art at the top of the article...

goes through the various suspects with commentary from Loeb, so obviously Loeb knew about the article...

and in the end, the Wizard staff guesses Alberto is the killer (even though, at this point in the series, Alberto was still supposed to be dead)...

So the theory goes that Loeb changed the ending after Wizard guessed it.

I went right to the direct source, the great Jeph Loeb himself, for the answer, and he explained, "No we did not change the ending due to a Wizard article or any of the other guesses our loyal readers made." He added, "Only three people knew the truth from the beginning. Tim Sale, myself, and the late great Archie Goodwin to whom I give all the credit!"

So there ya go, Adrian (and anyone else who wondered about this one over the years)! Thanks to Adrian for the suggestion, thanks to Jeph Loeb for the answer and also thanks to my pal Gene for helping me figure out which issue of Wizard had this article in it!