Jeph Loeb always planned to be creating the final chapter in Batman's Long Halloween saga alongside Tim Sale, Loeb's friend of decades and the artist who co-created the original Long Halloween, its sequel Dark Victory, and 2021's Long Halloween revival one-shot, which Loeb and Sale told Newsarama at the time was just the lead-in to the story that has now become Batman: The Last Halloween.
But Sale passed away suddenly in 2022, leaving behind a legacy as an artistic visionary with an instantly recognizable style, and just a few unfinished pages for the story he and Loeb had planned on telling. And with Sale's death, Loeb also thought the story would die with him.
"I didn't think there was gonna be a plan B, but there turned out to be a plan B," Loeb told Newsarama, just ahead of The Last Halloween #1's September 25 release. The issue marks the start of a story Loeb initially planned not to tell without Sale, but wound up seeing as a loving tribute to the artist.
"I worked out an outline with Tim of the 10-part mystery. I had written the first two scripts, and as he was just starting the art, he was gone," Loeb explains. "That's what happens with people. So I took the scripts and put them in a drawer, and told DC, 'Well, there's no point in doing this, I'm just gonna go back to doing nothing'."
Loeb now chuckles a bit in his recounting of what he thought was the end of The Last Halloween. But at the time, he couldn't imagine anyone else working on the story he had co-created with Sale, who had been his artistic partner for nearly 30 years on stories including Superman For All Seasons, Spider-Man: Blue, Hulk: Gray, Daredevil: Yellow, and Captain America: White, and of course the entire lineage of Batman: The Long Halloween.
"About a year went by, and then I was talking to Richard Starkings, our letterer and designer, and, in many ways, our editor emeritus, who has been on everything Tim and I have done. And then there's the other piece of the wheel, Mark Chiarello, who was the art director at DC for years, and is now on his own. He was also the editor on Dark Victory," Loeb continues.
"We've all stayed very close, and obviously Tim's passing made us closer, and we just started talking one day about what we should do with The Last Halloween, and what came out of those conversations was a different way of looking at it, which was, instead of doing something without Tim, let's do something for Tim. Let's do it as sort of a tribute to him."
What sealed the deal for Loeb was an image envisioned first by Chiarello, who pictured Sale giving his seal of approval for the eventual finished product in a comforting - and familiar - setting.
"We were discussing the ways of doing it, and Mark came up with this lovely image that really changed it for me," Loeb elaborates. "Let's picture Tim sitting on Pa Kent's porch in Smallville, and he's looking at all the different artists who have completed this story, and he has a smile on his face. I couldn't get that image out of my head."
Here's a gallery of covers for Batman: The Long Halloween -The Last Halloween #1-3:
From there, the decision was made to have a different artist on each issue, with a creative roster drawn from Sale's closest peers, many of whom rarely do interior comic book art.
"We decided that we wanted to have artists who Tim found influential. Not necessarily that they would draw like him, because that's not something he would ever want. We wanted them to draw exactly as Tim got excited about them," explains Loeb. "The first person we asked was Eduardo Risso, who drew the first issue. Then we made a list. So it's Eduardo, then Klaus Jansen, Mark Chiarello, Cliff Chiang, Bill Sienkiewicz, Enrico Marini, Dave Johnson, Becky Cloonan, Chris Samnee, and Mateo Scalera."
And of course, The Last Halloween still includes Tim Sale's personal touch, as the main cover of each issue features previously unpublished art from Sale's own archives, colored by his longtime collaborator Mark Chiarello.
"Every A cover is a piece of art that Tim had done before he passed, that no one has ever seen, colored by Mark Chiarello," Loeb explains. "And they're just spectacular. Then the interior artists, they're all doing the B covers, and those are all mugshots of the characters that are featured in each issue."
"Then there's this other group of artists that wanted to come and play. I call them my superstar tribute guys," says Loeb - all A-list artists who jumped on board to provide a third set of variant covers for all 10 issues of Batman: The Last Halloween.
"It starts off with that guy Jim Lee. Then J Scott Campbell, then Arthur Adams, then Ian Churchill, then Rob Liefeld, who had never done a Batman cover before, Joyce Chin, Cully Hamner, Brian Stelfreeze, and then we finish with Adam Hughes," Loeb says. "It was one of those things where, like, all I had to do was say 'We're doing this for Tim,' and they'd go 'Yes. I'm in.' Like, don't you even want to know what it is? 'No, we don't care. We're in. Whatever you want to do'."
In the end, Loeb sees the tremendous effort of so many artists, all of whom participated out of love for Sale, as his departed friend's gift not just to fans, but to him.
"I think the real gift, Tim's last gift to me, is that I'd never worked with many of these people before," Loeb states. "So I got to get to know a group of artists that Tim admired, and who loved Tim and Tim loved them. And now I'm part of that gang."
"On top of all that, there's a really good story in here," Loeb quips. "So that's the best part of everything we've talked about."
Batman: The Last Halloween #1 is now available. The Last Halloween #2 goes on sale October 30.
Check out part one of our interview with Jeph Loeb on Batman: The Long Halloween - The Last Halloween.
