Batman: Dark Patterns #6 Review

The 2025 Eisner Award nominations were announced earlier this week.

Doubtless you visited our humble site to catch up on all Bat-related nominations.

If you’re like me, you scrolled past the usual names and predictable nominees in search of your favorite, if less talked about, title, only to find it virtually unmentioned.

It’s clear the nominating body hadn’t read this genuinely thrilling conclusion to “The Voice of the Tower”.

Batman, nearly getting a full grasp of the situation he’s walked into, teams up with lowly Arnold Wesker to defeat Scarface and rescue the trapped police officers. But after the building catches fire, and after it turns out that Wesker doesn’t have much to say, it’s a race against time to save as many lives as possible.

At the outset of this chapter, I would have assumed that Watters was going for lighter fare given the campiness of the premises. And while we don’t exactly get Dostoevsky here, and while Watters does lean into some camp elements by giving Bats some bat-labeled detective gear and more logic-threading investigatory monologues, there is a punch here at the center of this issue. The script adeptly, if briefly, touches on the theme of voices: which ones we hear and what they have to say to us.

While Arnold Wesker ends up being a kind of emotional core of this issue (how can he not be? He’s such a compellingly pathetic shell of a man, driven by such twisted, cyclical impulses), I would have liked to have seen Batman himself fall victim, just for a moment, to those same voices and we had explored what might be the whispers in his head driving him. I don’t want this series to become any kind of deep dive into Bruce’s psyche, and I’m quite enjoying this ride of the All Bat No Bruce adventure dynamic, but it’s something I think could have been easily capitalized on.

It’s another cracker of an artistic outing from Hayden Sherman and Tríona Farrell. Sherman’s inventive, fractured panel structuring is perfectly pitched to the disorientation of the script, and the inspired coloring choices make Batman’s heroic strides soar. Especially transcendent are a panel in which Batman is wearing night vision goggles, as well as poor Wesker taking one final look at the tower. It’s consistently brilliant stuff.

Whether this book is on people’s radars or flying steadily under them, Dark Patterns remains a gem among DC’s current monthly output. It’s a title deserving of greater recognition. And yes, I recognize that technically only its debut issue hit shelves in 2024, the Eisner Award qualifying window for this week’s nominees. But a guy can dream.

Recommend if…

• You want a fresh but authentic take on an underrated villain
• You’re into Bat-gear
• You like the movie “The Towering Inferno”

Overall:

This is a surprisingly moving and compelling last installment of what I had previously called a weaker chapter of this title. The artwork remains stellar, and the script delivers perfectly paced thrills without sacrificing character moments. “Dark Patterns” is a title firing on all cylinders.

Score: 8/10