What is this book about?

This is the sequel(?) to Batman: The long Halloween.

This story takes place one year after the “Holiday” killer was caught. This time the story revolves around a mystery surrounding a series of murders involving Gotham City police officers by a mysterious serial killer only known as “The Hangman.” Central to the storyline is a territory war between the criminal, Two-Face, and the remnants of the Falcone mob, led by Sofia Falcone.

Why should you read this book?

Because it’s one of the few sequels in comic history where it’s able to stand up to the original.

If I want to review this book, a good place to start is at the very beginning and looking at the creators of this book. You begin to see Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale have really begun perfecting their craft and style of working together because you can begin to see a continuity to how their books are produced. Everything ranging from the credits in the book to how the front and back covers correlate. Seeing two extremely talented people unifying their minds like this is a perfect example of why comic books are becoming more and more revered and are attracting new audiences.

I think the things I liked about this book was how little we saw Bruce Wayne in the book. Because Bruce Wayne is slipping away and Batman is taking over. You notice this more if you had read Batman: The long Halloween recently, because the contrast in the two books is hard to find. Since Harvey Dent, Bruce Wayne’s best friend goes away and becomes Two-face so does Bruce Wayne. Each man is lost without the other, and the masks remain dominant.

And just like last time, and in other related posts (Batgirl Volume: 1, Batman, and Batman: Gotham knights), the underlying point and real true reason to read any Batman book is how deeply rooted it is in the idea of family and how what that means and how it affects the people and things around you.

In fact I’m not sure I can say much more about this book other than what I had already said in the Batman: The long Halloween post.

I think I will say though that, it seems to be the writer’s of Batman comics are trying to tell us that the way we treat our families directly affects everyone and everything else around us. Which is usually the case with everything anyway. Our action or inaction towards members of our families will spark decisions and judgments of action or inaction in them which will then be filtered into all other aspects of our life.

These decisions we make, even in certain cases where our decisions are of bad intention or of bad consequence, it still may wind up being a good thing. I mean, Gotham City got Batman, Batman got Robin, and Gotham City is a little safer all because of the way people’s father’s handled certain situations.