Welcome to Loneliness & Cheeseburgers Presents: Batman: The Long Halloween, Issue #8 – “Chapter Eight: Mother’s Day”! In the previous installment, Carmine Falcone apparently hired the Riddler to give him answers as to the identity and whereabouts of Holiday, but the Riddler is so damn useless that he just goes “RIDDLE ME THESE QUESTIONS THREE” and other inanities, so Falcone kicks him out of his building. He almost gets killed by Holiday, but Holiday either misses on purpose or he really fucking sucks at shooting people, as it turns out.

Meanwhile, Batman’s faithful lackey Alfred tells him to start taking a closer look at Harvey Dent…

Oh yeah, have a good Mother’s Day, Bruce Wayne. She’s fucking dead you know lmao and also lol.

Batman: The Long Halloween, Issue #8 [July, 1997]
Written by: Jeph Loeb
“Chapter Eight: Mother’s Day”

Batman meets up with The Calendar Man back at Arkham Asylum. “It’s May,” Mr. Calendar says, smiling wryly. “You said you would have caught her by February.”

“I know what we said,” Batman growls.

Calendar Man insists it’s a woman, and Batman is skeptical. And anyway, why didn’t she kill anyone on April Fool’s Day? Hmm? THAT was a holiday, now wasn’t it?! The Calendar Man says what I was thinking at the time. “April Fools! No killing today!”

Batman asks this crazy motherfucker what he knows about Harvey Dent. Well, he knows he put him in the slammer, that’s one thing. He has a birthday coming up. *wink* Listen, Batty. Let out the freak and he’ll stop Holiday. He promises!

Before Batman can get any more out of this guy, a guard slumps on the floor behind him and begs for his help. There’s an escape on level 4, and that really sounds to me like the guard’s job to deal with. And he done fucked it up, of course. Why would there ever be competence in Gotham City?

Batman runs. The other guards say the man, Jonathan Crane, is gone. His mother came to visit him, and now he’s gone. Batman looks through the bars into an empty brick cage. He finds a little piece of straw, which tells me that Scarecrow is coming to visit now! Batman: The Long Halloween has really been a cavalcade of favorite villains, hasn’t it! Looking forward to Danny DeVito.

“Jonathan Crane strangled his mother years ago. On Mother’s Day. Someone else had a hand in this. Someone else brought him the straw. Unleashing the Scarecrow.”

OH BOY! I haven’t seen the Scarecrow yet in my Batman-reading adventures! I wonder if he needs a brain…

I hate it when scarecrows try to run away. It’s, like, you’re supposed to be scaring the crows!

Jonathan Scarecrow Crane didn’t get far, because Batman leaves the asylum and tackles the guy off of his horse. “Who helped you? Who set this up? Give me a name or I’ll–”

“Scarecrow” crumbles into a pile of dang ol’ hay, unleashing a cloud of toxins and nerve agents and smoke and mirrors and confetti. “A ruse,” Batman thinks before he starts doubling over coughing. He dies and we never see him again.

Meanwhile, Jimmy Jammy Gordon makes a stopover at Wayne Manor again. Alfred kindly tells him that Bruce Wayne is off fucking some broad again, and then asks Gordon why Bruce is even a suspect. He has no connection to Falcone, right? Right? Huh? Hmm? Yes.

Gordon says, yeah, well, if he cooperates then we can clear this all up and go home to our Kid Cuisines. Alfred must make it clear that it’s Mother’s Day, and Bruce is a mother-lover, and he’s probably at the cemetery humping her gravestone. Go find him there, would ya? *slams door*

Elsewhere, specifically the Gotham River Bridge (‘cause there’s only one, of course), Sofia Falcone holds a man by his neck over the edge. She wants a name and the man gives her a name: “Gunsmith”. He’s packing .22s and you can find him in Chinatown. Chong’s Tea House. Tommy Chong, I hope. That guy’s tea will give you a good buzz, that’s for certain!

He asks Sofia to let him go and she does! Right over the bridge! We all had a good laugh at that one.

At Chong’s Tea House, Sofia is too late. A murder occurred. A grisly, gruesome murder. A gun murder. And she looks mad that she didn’t get to do the gun murder herself.

Someone stole my goddamn kill!

Bruce walks along Crime Alley, famously named for its various crimes. He basically spends a few panels going “wah, my mother” until Gordon shows up. Bruce has a flashback of the guy with the gun that put bullets into his parents and then runs away like a baby. A baby who can run, not one of those dumb babies.

“HOLD YOUR FIRE!” yells Gordon as Bruce runs and sweats. “Bruce… running will only make things worse…”

“We made it mother,” Bruce says to his own decrepit brain as he leaps onto the top of a moving bus. “We made it.”

Gordon and his backup will ambush Bruce Wayne at the cemetery where he is currently crying at his mother’s grave.

End of story.

Final Thoughts

Man, these are short issues. I’m plowing through these.

I didn’t much care for this one! Mother issues and Scarecrows? Not my cup of Chong’s tea, I say. Let’s see if next is Memorial Day where Bruce cries at the Vietnam Veterans Wall o’ Names. And then waves a flag in their honor. Like a dick.