In the last Comic book legends revealedfind out how a missing page distorted the way readers read Batman: The Long Halloween
Welcome to Comic Book Legends Revealed! This is the eight hundred and sixty-fifth episode where we examine three comic book legends and determine if they are true or false. As usual, there will be three posts, one for each of the three captions. Click on here for the first legend in this all-Batman legends episode. Click on here for the second part of this all-Batman legends episode.
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COMIC CAPTION:
Alberto Falcone’s “body” was originally to appear in Batman: The Long Halloween.
STATUS:
True
Batman: The Long Halloween was a year-long series by Jeph Loeb and the late, great Tim Sale that saw Gotham City taken over by the so-called Vacation Killer, who, well, you know, killed people on vacation, like those guys who got killed on Valentine’s Day…
and the holiday killer then left behind a token symbolizing the holiday in question…
HOW WAS ALBERTO FALCONE CLASSIFIED A SUSPECT?
One of the main suspects of Batman: The Long Halloween was Alberto Falcone, the seemingly nebbishly son of mobster, Carmine Falcone. However, in the fourth issue, one of the main suspects seemed to be removed from the game board when Falcone appeared to have been killed…
And then his body fell off the boat on New Year’s Eve…
Batman confronts Falcone at his son’s grave in the next issue…
In Batman: The Long Halloween #10, the coroner of Gotham City is murdered…
In the next issue, Alberto Falcone’s aunt investigates the coroner’s office when she too is murdered…
This, of course, was part of the cover-up that Alberto Falcon was actually alive! He had faked his death!
Whether Alberto really is the only Holiday Killer in the comics (or if there were possibly MANY Holiday Killers) is a whole other story, but the bottom line is that one of the parts of the plot that people have clung to still think that Alberto was the killer is that when he was “killed” there was no body! When Wizard made a list of suspects, they included Alberto and specifically mentioned the missing body. The funny thing, however, is that the absence of a body was not originally planned!
RELATED:Did Death in the Family almost reveal to Joker that he knew Batman’s secret identity?
WAS IT ORIGINALLY GOING TO BE A LONG HALLOWEEN BODY?
In the paperback collection of Batman: The Long Halloween, there is a page where Alberto’s body was found! Obviously it wasn’t actually Alberto (and the coroner knew that, which is why Alberto had to kill him), but there was a body, because Loeb and Sale had clearly intended that people would ask that question on the absence of a body. It turns out that the page Sale drew with the body didn’t make it into the published comic…
It’s interesting that there were pages like that that didn’t make it into the finished comic. I would have thought Sale wouldn’t have gone to the effort of drawing a page if she wasn’t going to be in the finished comic, because it’s not like a sitcom, where you film X and cut it down to the low for the final product. Here he had to do extra work so that he was simply not used.
DISCOVER A TV LEGEND REVEALED!
In the latest TV legends revealed – Find out if a feud between Jennifer Aniston and Reese Witherspoon forced Friends to introduce another Rachel sister for the show.
MORE LEGENDS!
OK, that’s it for this episode!
Thanks to Brandon Hanvey for the Comic Book Legends Revealed logo, which I actually don’t even have anymore, but I used it for years and you still see it when you see my old columns, so that’s fair enough to thank him again, I think.
Feel free to (hell, please!) write in with your suggestions for future installments! My email address is cronb01@aol.com. And my Twitter feed is http://twitter.com/brian_cronin, so you can also ask me for captions there! Also, if you have any correction or comment, feel free to email me as well. CBR sometimes emails me with emails they receive about CBLR and that’s fair enough, but the fastest way to get a fix is to just email me directly, honestly. Corrections don’t bother me. Always better to get things accurate!
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