Ask anyone to name Frank Miller’s finest hour and the chances are they will say ‘The Dark Knight Returns’.

But the problem is that ‘The Dark Knight Returns’ isn’t that great. Don’t get me wrong, it is good, it’s just that ‘Year One’ is so much better.

It took the whole Batman mythos, spun it around and made it interesting again.

When Christopher Nolan decided to reboot the Batman movies after the travesty of justice that was Batman & Robin, he went for ‘Year One’ as his template.

And now having re-read ‘The Long Halloween’ it’s hard to escape the inevitable conclusion that when Nolan was looking for ideas for his second Batflick, he picked this one off the shelf. The 13-part mini series originally came out back in 1996 and 1997, running from one October to the other, and is a sequel to ‘Year One’. Written by Jeph Loeb – who has gone on to work on Heroes - it takes a young Batman and pits him against Mafia-style gangsters and a mysterious killer called Holiday, who has a habit of bumping people off on public holidays.

‘The Long Halloween’ is Batman the detective, not Batman the uber-thug, and pits him against a cold-blooded killer who specializes in bumping people off on public holidays.

And all right, so the killer is dubbed ‘Holiday’ which is a little on the naff side. You can just see the presenters of Crimewatch saying, with a terribly straight face; ‘If anyone has seen Mr Holiday, or knows of his whereabouts, can they please call this number in the strictest of confidence…’

Like The Dark Knight, Gotham City is over-run with gangsters who are straight from the Sopranos/Godfather school of charm and diplomacy. They’re big guys, who eat plenty of pasta, love their mothers and have names like Maroni and Falcone. They are nasty guys, doing nasty things and a young district attorney by the name of Harvey Dent wants to bring them to account.

While there are plenty of guest super-villains in this 13-part epic, including Catwoman, Poison Ivy, the Joker and the Riddler, it is very much Harvey Dent/Two-Face’s story and tells his origin in a slightly more convincing way than the movie did.

Like any story stretched over 13 chapters, it is a little on the long side, but like all the best whodunits, there are plenty of plot twists to keep the reader guessing as to who ‘Holiday’ is. The classic noir plot of scheming gangsters is brilliantly brought to life by Tim Sale’s artwork. It really does look like a Humphrey Bogart/Jimmy Cagney movie on paper, with tough guys and glamorous ladies.

Bruce Wayne does his best James Bond routine and even gets to romance Selina Kyle, while at the same time having to do battle with her alter-ego Catwoman. Still, that’s women for you!

The home lives of Jim Gordon and Harvey Dent are also brought into focus, and furnish the characters themselves with an extra dimension. The cost of fighting crime, particularly in a city as corrupt as Gotham, is a high one. Sociopaths like Batman can afford to lose themselves in the war against organized crime, but others can’t.

The actual identity of the killer is almost incidental to the journey Batman, Jim Gordon and Harvey Dent take. Dent, of course, pays the highest price of all, and there is real tragedy in his eventual fall. You might not have had a lot of sympathy for Dent in The Dark Knight, but after reading ‘The Long Halloween’, you might just say ‘I believe in Harvey Dent’.

And if you are looking for something to restore your faith in Batbooks after the less than earth-shattering Batman and Robin series, then please take this one off your bookshelf and enjoy it once again. Now that really is an offer you can’t refuse.

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