Batman: Dark Patterns #9 – Review

Writing reviews can get repetitive.

When you’re lucky enough to be covering the best Batman comic in years, then things can start to get really repetitive.

I’m happy to come on here every month and declare Dan Watters and Hayden Sherman’s “Dark Patterns”, wrapping up its third and best chapter, the best and most consistent title DC is putting out these days over and over. But there comes a point where you may need to stop taking my word for it and run, not walk, to your LCS and get all 9 issues.

You are buying these things, aren’t you?

In classic thriller third-act fashion, Batman wakes up bound and bleached in the dank Rookery apartment which he deduces is the de facto headquarters of this strange and chillingly revitalized Red Hood gang. Robbed of his physical faculties, the Dark Knight Detective must further deduce the motive and secrets of his captors, an elderly man and his teenage sidekicks, and escape in time to stop the fires ravaging Gotham.

This issue is a brilliant and succinct example of this reviewer’s particular favorite type of Batman story: one which recognizes that dressing up as a fearsome creature of darkness and instilling fear into the wretched denizens of a vulnerable city might not be a healthy thing to do, either for the city or for the man. Fear, intimidation, force, theatricality, pain: the best modern deconstructions of the Batman mythos have forced the man to reckon with the inherent dangers of these tools. “Dark Patterns” #9 does this brilliantly, albeit bleakly. There’s no day saved, there are no answers, there are simply more questions, more doubts, more anxieties. More fear.

Batman’s mental acuity is on full display here. He displays intricate forensic knowledge, leveraging the gruesome details against his squeamish foes to great success. It’s a winning moment of Batman’s intellectual prowess and detective work, one which recalls Robert Pattinson identifying the bruising around the slain mayor’s hand wound in the opening scene of 2022’s “The Batman”, a small but brilliant bit of detective work which allows the GCPD to get a more accurate timeline. Though Batman is on his own here in this issue, distinctly without hope of GCPD backup here in this blighted neighborhood, it’s a similarly effective touch.

Hayden Sherman, recent co-recipient of the 2025 Eisner Award for Best New Series for his stunning work on the Kelly Thompson-scripted smash hit Absolute Wonder Woman, continues to display mind-bending and inspired panel structuring. There’s one particular page which sees the Red Hood boys bickering over lookout duties told in three three-dimensionally receding rectangles pointing down the corridor through which the unlucky brother passes in order to exit the apartment, the three panels looming over the Batman like the watchful, intimidating eyes of his captors.

If all of that was a headache for you to read and try and visualize, you can be reassured that the actual execution of this and other moments is a lot more satisfying to look at than to try and rehash here in this criminally attenuated form. It’s trippy stuff. Sherman’s artwork throughout this title has perfectly balanced Gotham’s haunting aesthetic traditions and the story’s psychologically charged themes, and his work shows no sign of slowing down.

As for the fate of this new Red Hood Gang? Without spoiling anything, I simply invite the reader to recall the meaning of this chapter’s title, “Paraedolia”: our tendency to see things that are not really there.

Recommend if…

• You love the basement trap scene in “The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo”
• You like Batman brought to his bleakest and lowest
• You love the opening crime scene investigation sequence in 2022’s “The Batman”

Overall:

There’s no writer today who understands the depths of Batman’s anxieties more acutely than Dan Watters, and there is no team delivering on those foundations more thrillingly than Watters and Sherman. “Dark Patterns” has been nothing but highlights, and this gutting conclusion to its third chapter is no different. Do not miss “Dark Patterns”.

Score: 9/10.