Secret Wars on Infinite Earths: The Comic Book Fight Club

BATMAN versus SOFIA GIGANTE FALCONE

Peace (DC)
Where: Batman: Dark Victory #13 When: December 2000 Why: Jeph Loeb How: Tim Sale

The Story So Far...
The mystery of a new killer grips Gotham City in the wake of The Holiday murders. The months melt away as The Hang Man stalks the ranks of law enforcement, pinning a crude scribbling of the children's word game to their victims, written on documents taken from the desk of Harvey Dent.

The scarred former District Attorney has gone underground as the walls of suspicion and his enemies begin to close in around him. Former ally, Batman, is on his trail, but the man now dubbed "Two-Face" is busy with his own investigation, and the pair will inevitably reach the same conclusion, leading to a showdown with Sofia Gigante Falcone!

Tale of the Tape...
Strength: Draw 3 (Athlete)
Intelligence: Batman 5 (Professor)
Speed: Batman 3 (Athlete)
Stamina: Batman 5 (Marathoner)
Agility: Batman 4 (Gymnast)
Fighting: Batman 5 (Martial Artist)
Energy: Batman 4 (Arsenal)
Total: Batman 29 (Metahuman)

The Batman has had no shortage of run-ins with organized crime figures, but finding a comparison for the heiress to the Falcone Crime Family is no mean feat.

Sofia Gigante Falcone is one of a kind. The daughter of notorious Gotham City crime boss Carmine Falcone, she was much closer to her father than her mother, Luisa. Sofia inherited The Roman's cunning and determination, navigating mob rank with the benefit of a physically imposing stature and demeanor.

It's difficult to do Sofia Falcone's domineering size and aura justice. She is a truly powerful woman in every sense of the word -- but by the time of Batman: Dark Victory, she is carrying the literal & figurative scars of The Long Halloween.

The Holiday Killer's campaign against organized crime pushed Sofia to extremes and ended with her shocking plunge from the balcony of the Falcone Penthouse.

Catwoman's bola inadvertently saved Sofia from falling to her death, but in doing so, swung her uncontrollably through plate glass windows that sheered the right side of her face off, and left her wheelchair bound -- or so it seemed.

Cosmetic surgery, wigs, and a steel frame rebuilt Sofia's appearance, but rumors of her crippling physical injuries were greatly exaggerated. In fact, the wheelchair is a mere cover for her campaign as The Hang Man Killer: a serial murderer whose hanging modus operandi speaks to the physical strength of Sofia Falcone.

She isn't enhanced to the degree of Bane - who combined stratagem, training, and Venom augmentation to famously break the bat - but certainly possesses the natural physical attributes to give Batman a run for his money.

We know he can handle himself against the likes of a Venom-enhanced Riddler, Killer Croc, Fatman & Little Boy, and even Marvel's peak physical specimen, the super-soldier Captain America. How will he handle Falcone? Let's find out!

The Tape: Batman Ranking: Batman (#1)

What Went Down...

Gotham City burns from the inside out as the gas lines ignite, and Harvey "Two-Face" Dent crawls desperately through the labyrinthine sewers beneath.

Dent pulls himself across the stone, emerging from a metal hatch without noticing the dark figure hidden in the flames. A noose drops around his throat and yanks him toward the pipes overhead. On the other end of the rope - a hulking shadow, emerging through the flames as it sheds the metal frame around its head.

His executioner steps into the light -- Sofia Gigante Falcone, The Hang Man Killer.

The seemingly crippled crime boss almost fooled them all. They never suspected the woman in the wheelchair. She towers, completely capable and unencumbered, strong enough to hold a grown man off the ground by a rope around his throat.

Dent spits in Sofia's face. She yanks the rope and buries her right fist in his gut.

A razor-sharp batarang cuts the air and slices the rope. Two-Face drops.

The Dark Knight descends into the burning sewer tunnel, gliding over Sofia Falcone. A short uppercut knocks her back as he works through all the clues in his mind, unravelling and revising the inevitability of her guilt.

The powerful crime boss is disgusted that Batman would protect the Two-Faced former District Attorney. Falcone is more than able to match his blows, scuffling with a leading left that becomes an upward strike.

The Batman delivers a straight kick to her chest to wind the giant.

He follows rapidly with a precision nerve strike delivered with straightened hand.

A stiff uppercut completes the combination to end the Falcone Crime Family.

The Batman appears triumphant, but then --

Suddenly -- a gunshot rings out in the tight sewer tunnel and Sofia Gigante Falcone's grimace goes limp. Her eyes widen, dumbstruck, as blood bursts from her forehead. The Hang Man has been hit.

A noose drops around her neck, pulling the corpse away from Batman and toward those pipes running along the top of the sewer tunnel.

Falcone's body provides counterweight as Two-Face leaps to a lower level of the tunnel system, dangling from the other end of the rope in escape.

"You wanted it to end, Bats. So did I."

The pipe bursts as chunks of the old sewer system begin to collapse and fall away. Fire engulfs the underground. The Hang Man has been stopped, but it's not over. Not yet. Two-Face is still on the loose and The Batman has a cave to defend.

The Hammer...

It's been a while since I've revisited Dark Victory, but I remember a lot of it quite well. Not just through the ripples of its influence in the adaptations of Christopher Nolan, or the recent HBO live-action Penguin series streaming to MAX, but from the impact of that very first read some twenty-plus years ago.

The Long Halloween had passed me by, but I read vicariously through the pages of Wizard Magazine, where the hottest Batman story of the mid-late nineties was the source of much speculation and excitement. It got me excited, too!

Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale quickly became a must-read partnership as I reinvested myself in DC's Dark Knight -- a lapsed favourite from earlier childhood. Naturally, a collected edition of The Long Halloween became an instant favourite. I cherish it still. It's on top of a tall stack of comics on my desk right at this moment.

I still consider the two maxi-series to be among the very best Batman stories on offer. Individually, or together, they address the greatest aspects of the character, and his surrounding world. Masterworks ripe for study and enjoyment.

There is the thrilling tour through the iconic rogue's gallery that offers instant amusement and all the action you could want. Commissioner Gordon and Harvey Dent intersect with the conflict between organized crime and these new "freaks" in Gotham City. Dent's fateful transformation into Two-Face is retold, becoming an actualized transition between the two paradigms, nestled within an unfolding crime caper that fulfills the old fashioned pulp fiction of Detective Comics, while also addressing the oft-neglected mystery-solving of The Dark Knight Detective.

Loeb & Sale's work builds directly on a foundation of Year One, but surpasses it in a great many ways, better reflecting a definitive version of the superhero, while adapting the montage technique of Frank Miller and David Mazzucchelli's four issue classic to create a monthly timeline that plays directly into the story.

The overarching threat of "The Long Halloween" is a veiled antagonist, The Holiday Killer, who strikes but once a month -- just like comic books. In Dark Victory, it's the mysterious Hang Man who terrorizes Gotham by calendar.

The layers are many, and that doesn't even begin to address the immediate appeal of Tim Sale's artwork, complimented beautifully by the colours of Gregory Wright. The collaboration with Sale is impeccable, creating an unrivaled mood for Gotham City and its many haunts. You see it in every gloomy night, grand interior, and stone-walled sewer tunnel.

The penciler's layouts, designs, and expressive characters are on another level. Cinematic, beyond merest reality, yet believably grounded in it.

I recall listening to an interview with Fanboy Radio, where Sale waxed romantically about his real-world inspiration for Catwoman -- a character he and Loeb revisited with the sequel mini-series, Catwoman: When In Rome.

I wouldn't ordinarily skip straight to the conclusion of the second series, but I settled on today's featured fight for its reflection of all of Sale's skills. In particular, I wanted an entry that captured the grandeur of his vision for Sofia Gigante Falcone, who seems underserved by the recent live-action casting of diminutive, slight, and conventionally glamorous, 5'2" Cristin Milioti.

I've already expressed misgivings about the entirety of The Penguin spin-off and its origins in The Batman. Not having seen the show, I wouldn't want to be too outwardly venomous towards Milioti's portrayal, but I think the panels included in today's entry speak to the vast disparity between the originating comic book character, and Hollywood's all too typical choice for females in these projects.

Towering and scarred, wearing that heavy trench coat, there's obviously a lot of dramatic exaggeration going on in this final chapter of Dark Victory, but for anyone who has read both series throughout, you will recognise Sofia Falcone as an archetype that exists in life. A powerful, physically imposing Italian woman, with strong features. A distinct and appropriate choice for the character, whose domineering presence looms literally & figuratively over both stories.

With so much of contemporary cinema caught up in social concerns, it's a little dismaying to see female characters with unique characteristics, be they body-type or age, regularly supplanted in live-action with more standard types.

Marisa Tomei as Aunt May might be the most egregious example of this time, but I also think of DC's Amanda Waller, who is yet to have the robust physicality of "The Wall" seen in classic comics in any of her live-action portrayals.

Put simply: Sofia Gigante Falcone would crush her live-action counterpart in much the way she squeezed Riddler's head to the point of bleeding.

A fantastic character, who like other key figures in The Long Halloween and Dark Victory, is irreversibly corrupted by Gotham City and her own obsessions, driven to becoming one of the very "freaks" her family so detests. Thus, The Hang Man Killer is hung by her own noose. A perfect, ironic end, punctuated with a gunshot to the head to seemingly rule out another miraculous return from the dead.

Of course, this isn't actually the end. There was The Long Halloween Special in 2021, and now Jeph Loeb has collaborated with another excellent Batman artist, Eduardo Risso, to begin Batman: The Long Halloween - The Last Halloween. A final chapter that pays homage to Tim Sale, who passed away in June, 2022.

It still hits me pretty hard to think about that.

I didn't know the man personally, but his work has been tremendously important to me. Having neglected talking about these favourite series all these years, I finally started working on an entry for Halloween 2021, but when I couldn't confidently describe a detail in the story, I wanted to seek clarification from the source. Just over half a year later, I understood how poor my timing must have been. That entry, or any others, just became a little too hard to think about.

We're blessed to have Sale's work adorn Last Halloween covers. His unmistakable hand still a part of the project. I think fondly not just of his work on The Long Halloween and Dark Victory, but also his covers for Detective Comics, which were as exciting at times as the interior issue itself.

One day I will return to that unfinished 2021 entry, and other memorable moments from The Long Halloween and Dark Victory, but for now I'm taking a break.

You can find relevant entries, past and future, by following links throughout this article, or by diving in to the Secret Archive. That's where every featured fight is filed in order of publisher, series, and issue number. Starting with DC, you'll be able to find plenty of Batman right near the top, but I also recommend following the Tim Sale label for some of his other fantastic works, at DC and elsewhere.

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Winner: Two-Face & Batman
#152 (+297) Two-Face [+1 kill]
#1 (--) Batman
#1032 (new) Sofia Gigante Falcone