So instead of thinking about how to do The Last Halloween without Sale, Loeb, Starkings, and Chiarello decided to do The Last Halloween for Tim Sale, choosing artists who inspired Sale and were inspired by him.
“I knew it was a 10-part story so I wanted to have 10 artists. I didn’t want anyone thinking, ‘You just replaced Tim with this guy.’ It takes 10 people to replace him. Or, more appropriately, it takes 10 people to show how much they loved him.”
The list of creators reads like a comic book hall of fame. Interior art comes from Eduardo Risso, Klaus Janson, Bill Sienkiewicz, Cliff Chiang, Enrico Marini, Dave Johnson, Becky Cloonan, Chris Samnee, and Mateo Scalera. The series also features covers from Jim Lee, J. Scott Campbell, Arthur Adams, Ian Churchill, Rob Liefeld, Joyce Chin, Cully Hamner, Brian Stelfreeze, Juanjo Guarnido, and Adam Hughes.
Impressive as the list is, Loeb hastens to point out that the goal wasn’t to grab the biggest names. When DC initially suggested some superstar artists, Loeb responded “No, no, no, no, no. We wanted the book to come from people who were Tim’s inspirations. These would be the people who Tim would show to me and say, ‘Have you looked at this guy work! This guy’s amazing!’”
But the real special part are the alternative covers from Sale himself. “Tim would often do a whole cover, finish the whole thing, and come up with a different idea. There wasn’t anything wrong with the cover, it was beautiful, but he would go and do another one,” Loeb says.
As wonderful as the outpouring for Sale is, Loeb also knows that his friend would care deeply about the story that they’re telling. ” Hopefully, it’s a story that will have the same kind of impact as the previous stories,” Loeb says of The Last Halloween. “I left breadcrumbs without knowing that I had left breadcrumbs, sometimes like Hansel and Gretel, so there’s even stuff that winks back to the first three Halloween specials.”