If you ask comic book fans what the most influential Batman stories are, they will probably cite Frank Miller's Batman: Year One or The Dark Knight Returns. They're not wrong, necessarily, but hands down the single most influential comic on modern Batman movies and TV shows – particularly HBO's currently airing The Penguin – is Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale's The Long Halloween and its sequels.
Published by DC in 1996 and 1997, the 13-issue series charted Batman's investigation of Holiday, a killer who murders people on, well, holidays. It was itself a sequel to three Halloween specials Loeb and Sale had published in Legends of the Dark Knight (which are collected as Batman: Haunted Knight) and was followed by two sequels: Batman: Dark Victory, and Catwoman: When in Rome. Though Sale passed away in 2022, Loeb worked out one final story with the artist, and the first issue of the closing chapter of this "trilogy" was published last week by DC Comics under the title Batman: The Long Halloween - The Last Halloween.
