Kicking off a new arc, Batman: Dark Patterns #7 opens with a huge multi-paned window inside Wayne Manor, as Bruce Wayne is recovering from one of his nightly escapades. Outside, it shows Gotham City in flames, and while Bruce closes his distance with the glass, his face takes the space of a single window pane, and fills the whole page. With these opening pages alone, Hayden Sherman perfectly captures the theme of patterns and perspective, setting the stage for the mystery to come.
This third arc is titled “Pareidolia” – the tendency to apply meaning to random shapes and visual patterns, like seeing a face in the cloud, or for Batman, a familiar grin on a bloodied bandage. True to its name, Dark Patterns has Bruce reckon with the patterns that keep returning to him. Faces of his foe appear everywhere, and even the Red Hood gang, Joker’s original persona, seems to make a resurgence. All this information is conveyed seamlessly through Dan Watters’s brilliant writing and Sherman’s visual storytelling. Readers experience Bruce’s paranoia alongside him.
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To solve the mystery, Batman ventures to Old Gotham, a part of the city that embodies what people think about when they use the name “Gotham” as a derogatory term. It’s a maze full of the homeless, the forgotten, and the hopeless, linked together by tangled telephone lines.
In this issue, traditional comic book panels transform into windows from tenement buildings, appearing at oblique angles. The page becomes a blueprint of Gotham’s derelict district, with Batman at its center.
Sherman never sticks to conventional paneling. Here, no two pages look alike. Sometimes, Batman is situated in an isometric perspective, showing just how small he is inside the labyrinthine neighborhood of Old Gotham. Other times, he’s shot at low angles. Sherman’s invisible camera is alive, moving at every panel, attuned to Watters’s text. Even when it’s a straightforward page read vertically, Sherman shakes it up by making the panels from the POV of a criminal chased by Batman.
Visually, Dark Patterns #7 captures the soul of a Batman story, an undead city that never sleeps. And Dan Watters’s voice for each of the iconic characters feels as true as the original creators, Bill Finger and Co., intended – the definitive takes of Batman and Gordon. But plot wise, it’s comparably more ordinary than the previous two arcs, though its simplicity can be its strength.
This is the type of story that they don’t tell anymore, harking back to Legends of the Dark Knight, the type of work you would imagine Batman does in between his big events. This is the kind of mystery a Batman channel would show at 3 AM.
Batman: Dark Patterns #7 is what people have been asking for in a Batman story: less multiversal threats and Joker wars, more gritty mysteries and properly set up clues. No soap opera, no city-destroying threats, just a dead body and a detective. It’s a premise that is executed with skill and well-defined style.
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