“I believe in America.”
— Amerigo Bonasera
The first lines in the movie The Godfather (1972) christened a respectable trilogy. Two-and-a-half decades later, The Long Halloween found its way to bookstores with the protagonist, millionaire Bruce Wayne, opening the story saying, “I believe in Gotham City.”
Noir is at its peak in this graphic novel, because Wayne’s listener, gangster
Carmine Falcone, is shown as a literally shadier version of thespian Marlon Brando’s Don Corleone. Both of them smell a flower in the same way. It is not a coincidence. Artist Tim Sale displays his affinity for the classic gangster films by making Falcone’s act as visually close to Corleone’s as possible.
Two more aspects remain to show writer Jeph Loeb’s bow to The Godfather. The first is the wedding of Johnny Viti, which has a darkened essence of Connie Corleone’s party. Finally, the spying photographer, who had a minor role in
the movie, was a prominent character in The Long Halloween: District Attorney
Harvey Dent. Thus ends the first stage of references to The Godfather, and the story kick-starts. Three men make a pact to bring down the Gotham City underworld. Police Captain James Gordon, Dent and a vigilante going by the name of Batman agree to work together on the case.
However, while they embark on their noble mission, a killer called Holiday guns down members of Falcone’s gang. The killings correspond to the holidays of the year like Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year’s, Valentine’s Day, St Patrick’s Day, April Fool’s Day, Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, Independence Day, Roman Holiday, Labor Day and back to Halloween. Each chapter has a holiday as the literary backbone. Symbols of that corresponding holiday are left at the crime scene, like the carved-out pumpkin for Halloween, a heart-shaped box of chocolates for Valentine’s Day and so on and so forth.
As the murders become more puzzling and complex in nature, further bows to The Godfather are made. For example, gangster Salvatore Maroni’s father was shown as an aged Don Corleone as essayed by Brando. In another scene, a chandelier falls due to continuous gunfire, which will remind movie fans of the part where Vincent Mancini (Andy Garcia) whisks the decrepit Michael Corleone (Al Pacino) to safety in The Godfather, Part III (1990). Writer Loeb even went to the extent of using a quote from The Godfather, Part II (1974) verbatim, “Keep your friends close, your enemies closer.”
To understand the reason behind marrying Bob Kane’s comic-book heroism with Mario Puzo’s dark characterisations in The Long Halloween by adding shadows to potentially gaudy colours, one has to dwell a bit on American history.
During the World War years, while the United States was becoming the international ‘hero’, it was ravaged by gangsters in the wake of economic depression. At that time, the public enemies were well-defined, but as the decades passed, the Vietnam War and Richard Nixon’s Watergate Scandal reflected on an artist’s need for expressing a lack of faith in the internal system. Focusing on the descent of District Attorney Harvey Dent from the golden boy nicknamed Apollo to the freak rogue calling himself Two-Face shows that justice can be obtained, or not, at the flip of a coin.
Additionally, when the United States had waged the Gulf War against Iraq in 1991, the intervention was received with mixed views worldwide. Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale had no choice but to resort to such noir renderings as per the requirement of editor Archie Goodwin. Sale, although unnecessarily, continued on that tangent even for Superman Confidential, which is probably a residual effect of the War on Terror.
The exertion of social, political and economic events on storytelling and subsequently, culture defines the readers’ mindset, and it is that mindset that comic-book writers cater to. There was a time when comics could appear only in educational magazines. When the supplement became the main attraction of the day, it gave rise to the new reading subculture. Agatha Christie’s novels are already being adapted into graphic novels, and The Long Halloween was merely a transitional publication where the elements of a classic, both the literary and its cinematic counterpart, were incorporated into the comic-book medium.
— Nithin blogs at www.atlasreborn.blogspot.com