The mood directly contrasts the earlier material, being a light caper story influenced by the 1960s cinematic equivalents. It’s unfortunate that a story element to keep readers guessing is a matter revealed in Dark Victory, but then that’s not the entire purpose. In combination with colourist Wright, Sale again presents an appealing dark and shadow led noir world that many subsequent Batman artists would take as an influence.Ĭatwoman plays a large role in the early stages of Dark Victory, and her solo story When in Rome, is partially a sidebar to that. Sale redesigns the Joker, now a grotesquely stylised creature, and supplies a more muscular Batman, but those are the visual exceptions to another uniquely realised environment.

Other characters don’t integrate as smoothly, with Robin really only serving as a marker of time, and the new District Attorney a sore thumb until her ultimate purpose, while Loeb repeating the plot template results in greater contrivance and predictability.

Success prompted a sequel, and while by no means poor, Dark Victory fails to engage as completely in tying up a few loose ends, although a sympathetic treatment of Commissioner Gordon used as a device to unite the chapters works nicely. Taking his inspiration from the 1940s Batman to create a shadowy world capable of bursting into colour, Sale creates iconic versions the villains, and Gregory Wright’s colour work is excellent. Sale’s sparse and moody art, however, raises the story to another level. It’s an extremely satisfying formula, well applied, with twists enough to fool the seasoned crime reader right until the final disclosures, and many of Batman’s villains appearing. Each of the thirteen chapters takes place on a public holiday, and each moves the plot forward by a month as the Holiday Killer repeatedly murders, and early in his career Batman is constantly thwarted. However, as the story content is four graphic novels in print as paperbacks since their original publication, with the entire content available over three Absolute editions, is there anyone still left to buy the Omnibus? It is cheaper than the combined price of the Absolute hardcovers.Īlthough they’d previously collaborated on a trio of Batman halloween stories ( Haunted Knight), it was the Eisner Award winning The Long Halloween that cemented Loeb and Sale’s reputations. The work of Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale on Batman has long been regarded as gold standard material, so an Omnibus edition might seem to make sense.

Batman Noir by Jeph Loeb