How Did Joker React to the Holiday Killer Becoming Gotham’s Most Famous Villain?

Today, we see how the Joker reacted to the Holiday killer becoming a more feared presence in Gotham City than him (hint – it did not go over well).

It’s our yearly Comics Should Be Good Advent Calendar! Every day until Christmas Eve, you can click on the current day’s Advent Calendar post and it will show the Advent Calendar with the door for that given day opened and you can see what the “treat” for that day will be! You can click here to see the previous Advent Calendar entries. This year, the theme is a Very Dope 90s Christmas! Each day will be a Christmas comic book story from the 1990s, possibly ones that have a specific 1990s bent to it (depends on whether I can come up with 24 of them).

This year’s Advent Calendar, of Grunge Santa Claus giving out 90s present, like a Tamagotchi, while posing with four superheroes with the most-90s costumes around, is by Nick Perks.

And now, (just a LITTLE bit late) Day 23 will be opened (once opened, the door will feature a panel from the featured story)…

Today, we look at 1996’s “Christmas” from Batman: The Long Halloween #3 by Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale.

As you likely know, Tim Sale and Jeph Loeb first worked together on a miniseries in the early 1990s called Challengers of the Unknown. It was Loeb’s first comic book work and the two then started doing yearly Batman Halloween one-shots. They were all really good, but in the fourth year, rather than do yet another one-shot, they instead decided to do a year-long maxiseries (hence the title, “The Long Halloween”). The format of the maxiseries allowed Sale to expand his artwork a bit more than normal, since they obviously had more room to work with the story than the typical one-shots that had to get a beginning, middle and end all in one issue (Sale’s work on those one-shots are excellent, as well, of course, I just mean that there wasn’t quite as much room in the comics for Sale to sort of freestyle and when Sale freestyles, my goodness, it is a thing of stunning beauty).

Along those lines, then, the third issue of Long Halloween allows Sale to cut loose on an excellent early sequence where we see the Joker reading the newspaper reports about the Holiday killer…

You see, the hook of the series is that a mystery villain known only as “Holiday” is killing people on, well, you know, holidays. This series is set in the early days of Batman’s war on crime, so the Joker had only recently debuted at this point. If you don’t recall, the Joker’s debut story in Batman #1 is notable not only for how outright DARK it is (the guy kills a few people in clever ways before Batman finally brings him to justice) but also for how much the Clown Prince of Crime clearly enjoys the attention that he was receiving for his killings. You see, he announced beforehand who he would kill next and then the challenge would be how he STILL managed to kill his victims despite giving the police seemingly a lot of warning (obviously, the trick is that he set things up before alerting people to his next victim, so just some deadly legerdemain). The Joker loved how unsettling that made the people of Gotham City and guess what, right now, their attention was now on this mysterious Holiday killer and as you can see in this striking double-page spread, the Joker is not happy about that…

Meanwhile, we get a quick visit to Arkham Asylum, where Jim Gordon voices the thought that obviously has crossed a lot of people’s minds over the years. Is it possible that Batman’s presence in Gotham City is drawing these lunatics here? Batman dismisses the idea, but you can’t help but think that he considers that same idea himself.

The Joker confronts Gotham’s #2 crime boss, Sal Maroni, to find out who Maroni thinks the Holiday killer is and Maroni suggests Harvey Dent. Batman confronts Maroni on what went on with his conversation with the Joker and you have to almost feel for Maroni as he really IS surrounded by some crazy characters…

We see Dent showing his wife the new home that he bought for them and there’s an excellent moment where Dent tells her to go upstairs, hiding his reason for WHY and that is that he has seen the Joker in their living room, creepily hanging out by the Christmas tree that the Joker had brought into the house…

Dent, headstrong as always, just charges the Joker and wow, the visuals are fascinating, as Sale continues his drawing of the Joker as a grotesque being, but interacting with the “normal” Dent in a fight…

In the end, the Joker wins and we see that the Joker really is just upset about not being the top homicidal maniac in Gotham…

We then see the Joker threaten Alberto “The Roman” Falcone, the TOP crime boss in Gotham and warn him that he better find out who the Holiday killer is or the Joker will kill everyone until he knows the answer himself.

On the way out, Falcone’s bodyguard tries to stop the Joker, but the villain distracts him with a bunch of Joker playing cards. While the bodyguard bends over to pick up his gun, he is then murdered by the Holiday killer and when Batman arrives and sees the Joker cards (along with the trademark Holiday memento, in this case, a snow globe), Batman thinks that the Joker IS Holiday and that leads to an excellent confrontation in the next issue that plays on the major turning point of this series. You see, this is set at a time when Batman thinks he might actually be able to “win” his war on crime, but instead, villains like the Joker just keep coming. So when Batman takes on the Joker in the next issue, he still thinks that if he defeats the Joker, that might be “enough” and, well, it will never be enough.

Uh…Merry Christmas, Batman?

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