Pareidolia: the human psychological tendencies to see patterns and recognizable forms among random objects or stimuli. It’s seeing a shocked face in an electrical outlet. An animal in the clouds. A hunter among the stars.
Or a killer smile in the ring pattern of moisture left on a surface by a glass of water.
Thomas Pynchon, the great American literary chronicler of all things paranoiac, wrote in his 1973 magnum opus Gravity’s Rainbow about the strange comfort of paranoia, an almost religious ease of the feeling that everything is connected. But he also contended with its inverse, the fear that nothing is connected, what he called anti-paranoia. And it is a fearsome thing, this feeling which, as Pynchon writes, is “a condition many of us cannot bear for long”.
In Dark Patterns #7, Dan Watters shows us exactly how long the Dark Knight Detective can bear this fear.
This new chapter of DC’s best mystery series kicks off in absolutely chilling fashion. Bruce is at home, in the many-windowed study where a bat first burst through the glass and birthed a legend. He’s icing up, mulling over these last two cases (Wound Man and Scarface’s Haunted High-Rise), trying not to see patterns and instead just do his job. But when one too many fires pop up in his city, he investigates, fearing something larger is at play after the fires which spawned his last two cases.
What he finds seems routine, if grisly: a body. But it’s what that body leads him to discovering that’s got Batman shaken more deeply than he maybe wants to let on. Whether he wants to or not, he begins to see Gotham for its dark patterns.
Transcending that pareidoliac, illogical pattern-seeking is exactly what literary detectives must do. It’s why Sherlock Holmes is always railing against narrative, against storytelling or fanciful reasonings of motive-hunting. After all, we’ve got Bats closing out this issue by uttering Holmes’ catchphrase, borrowed from Shakespeare: “The game is afoot!”
We need not even look to fiction for proof of the virtues of objective, independent reasoning. Marcus Aurelius implores this of us: “Of each particular thing, ask: ‘what is it in itself? What is its nature?’”. (Have I actually read Marcus Aurelius? No. Am I just getting this quote from “Silence of the Lambs”? Of course. But you get the idea.)
Hayden Sherman’s artwork continues to be spectacular. This whole title has routinely pushed Gotham’s Protector to his psychic limits, and Sherman’s page and panel construction leaned consistently and perfectly into this fraying of a hyper-rational mind. Their work on Absolue Wonder Woman is also highly commendable, but this to me is his coolest work; a title allowing him to go weirder and weirder. Tríona Farrell’s coloring work here too remains bright, psychedelic, and all together forceful. It’s an artistic output that would threaten to steal the show if the scripts were not so tight.
The biggest, most satisfying moment of this new issue is one I don’t want to spoil, but suffice it to say that it involves a legitimately interesting recontextualization of an old familiar foe. If you’re tired of that sort of thing, this incessant rehashing of old familiar foes, I totally get it— I am too. I however implore you to go into this with an open mind regarding that sort of thing. I think you will be as excited as I am.
That’s the general tenor of things when I sit down to read Batman: Dark Patterns— excitement. Excitement for great, strongly intentional storytelling. Excitement for brooding, fun detective mysteries being allowed to do what they do best.
I probably say this every month, but Dark Patterns is one of the best comics on your local store’s shelves, and it is showing absolutely no sign of slowing down.
Recommend if…
- You want to finally be rewarded for seeing a writer “rethink” something in Gotham’s past
- You’re maybe just a little bit conspiracy-minded
- The Hound of the Baskerville is your favorite Sherlock Holmes mystery
Overall: Issue #7 of this excellent title sees things seamlessly transitioning from its episodic nature to a larger narrative throughline. There has always been a sure-handed creative team at the helm here, but readers are now witnessing just how masterful their strokes are. Do not wait around for a bad Dark Patterns issue. It won’t happen.
Score: 9/10
English (US) · 