Last month, I gave this book its first lukewarm review. The first you’ll find on this site, anyhow.
I urged you, reader, to fear not. To trust in Misters Watters and Sherman to be cooking up something truly great. To trust that they would grace our shelves with something worthy of being the final act crescendo of this excellent piece.
Like Alfred, I’m always right.
Gordon has Firefly out of Arkham for the evening, hoping to pick his brain Hannibal-Lecter-style and get his expert input on the latest arson ravaging Gotham’s oldest and most architecturally vulnerable neighborhood. Meanwhile, Bruce, sleep-deprived, cut up, bloody, mind and body ravaged by fever and infected wounds, insists to a worried Alfred that he’s got the answers nearly in his grasp. Bruce then must face a race against time, his failing body, and the screaming, smoking ghosts of Gotham’s past in order to stop the madness of the Child of Fire.
Dan Watters’ writing on “Dark Patterns” has been widely lauded for its intense and episodic nature. While those praises can still ring true, it’s this final chapter bringing everything together and following up on subtle throughlines that brings this miniseries from the realm of the Great to the Truly Memorable. The format of the limited series can allow authors to deepen their exploration of a handful of themes without the shackles of the storytelling concerns that come with ongoing titles.
Sherman’s panel construction is settling into, well, into a pattern. It no longer jumps off the page with its sheer inventiveness and novelty— it’s what we’ve now come to expect from picking up Dark Patterns. This is no fault of Sherman and should not be held against him. In addition to that narrative consistency I touched on earlier, another part of the joy of the miniseries or limited series format is artistic consistency from beginning to end, and holding this book in collected form will be a sight to behold. But simply with the passage of time (Christ it’s been a full year since I began covering this book) the jagged edges have dulled this reader’s experience.
Such a minor quibble aside, I truly believe that DC readers are witnessing the unfolding of a generational classic in Watters and Sherman’s “Dark Patterns”. It somehow feels like a book which is destined to continue flying under the radar and end up on lists of this generation’s “most underrated” stories, but to be here and present for its release month after month has reminded me why I love comics. So spread the word.
Recommend if you love…
- Batman fighting the ghosts of Gotham itself
- Alfred administering both medicine and tough love
- Gordon’s ill-advised trust of Gotham’s most dangerous maniacs
Overall: For a series that has revived our collective faith in the power and efficacy of Batman comics, there may be no single issue which has encapsulated what exactly makes a great Batman comic more readily than Dark Patterns #11. It’s got the moody, haunting atmospherics of TAS, the methodical, wounded detective work of 2022’s “The Batman”, and the thrilling cat-and-mouse chases of the Nolan movies, all while remaining something totally unique and undeniably comic-bookish. It’s a near-masterpiece.
Score: 9.5/10
English (US) · 