For this year’s Locke and Key re-read, I decided to jump into Vol. 3, Crown of Shadows, without re-reading Vol. 1 and Vol. 2. I expected to spend some time remembering details and getting back up to speed, but was instead surprised by how effortlessly I fell back into the story of the Locke family and the horrible, magical world that surrounds them.
As I’ve gotten older, my views on certain issues have evolved. But despite the fact that I’ve taken a “learn to hunt for food” class, shot target practice with my father- and brother-in-law, and cheered that same father-in-law on in quick draw competitons, my views on guns will never, ever outgrow Batman: Gotham Adventures 9.
Avengers: No Surrender is never going to be a Marvel movie. It’s embedded with far too much Marvel Comics minutiae to ever hit the big screen. It’s too sprawling; its cast of forty-some heroes and villains is too big.
But all that is what makes No Surrender the perfect Avengers COMIC story. And I’d argue that if you loved Infinity War, and you want to spend some of your pre-Endgame time seeing what Avengers comics are all about, that No Surrender is the book for you.
Twenty-some years on from its initial publication, Batman: The Long Halloween continues to leave readers without a clear answer to its central mystery:
“Who was the Holiday Killer?”
Because the book is often recommended to new readers, and because its ending contains so many open-ended statements and contradictions, the question of who committed what Holiday murders will likely never fade away. Indeed, as I prepared to write this post, my own hypothesis of who Holiday is flip-flopped, proving how nebulous any theory likely is.
But in my mind, there’s one clear place to start when assembling any theory about the Holiday Killer’s identity. And that’s by believing in Harvey Dent, as The Long Halloween so often asks us to do.
It’s time to continue Matt Reads Comics‘s October tradition: Re-reading the next volume of Joe Hill and Gabriel Rodriguez’s Locke and Key! A series that, at this pace, will take us only six years to finish.
