Batman: Dark Patterns is 12 issues of the dumbest Batman comics you’ll ever read.
It’s made up of four 3 issue story arcs, loosely connected to no effect, each increasingly stupid and more pointless.
The Wound Man has the worst character design I’ve ever seen. He looks like a human pin cushion and is more of a danger to himself than to anyone else - and that’s also the point, and that’s still ridiculous. Dan Watters seems to be trying to channel Se7en in this arc but fails because his story makes no sense. It’s some vague rubbish about evil corporation Ace Chemicals poisoning the water supply of a town just outside Gotham - nothing about it added up.
It gets worse with the next arc, Scarface Towers, about an apartment building with echo-y walls where someone pretending to be Scarface (the gangster ventriloquist dummy) speaks and, somehow, the voice hypnotises people into taking cops hostage - for no reason?
And it keeps getting astoopider still with the next one about a giant shanty town somehow being in the centre of Gotham and an unlikely trio of people trying to remind people of a forgotten gang from 70 years ago that might’ve come back in an effort to make everyone behave?!
The motivations, the plan - none of it makes sense. Least of all the shanty town - if Gotham is basically New York, ie. the place with the most expensive real estate in the world, it wouldn’t have that much space going to waste on bums. You would have developers like Trump swooping in, buying the land, kicking out the squatters, and building condos on it.
The book closes out with the final arc about Some Guy starting random fires around Gotham while dressed as a baby to frame a doctor for no reason. Pitiful garbage.
How does Dan Watters keep getting work? He’s one of the worst comics writers around who doesn’t seem to get any better over time. I read his awful Lucifer book in 2019 and he’s still putting out low quality drek for DC except now he’s been elevated to Batman?! Comics is apparently just another industry where you fail upwards the longer you stick around.
The Absolute Wonder Woman artist Hayden Sherman draws all of the issues here and, while none of it looks bad, I’m just not that taken with Sherman’s style. To me, it looks like Eduardo Risso-lite.
The only pattern discernible here is how terrible the comics that make up Batman: Dark Patterns are. Badly conceived and poorly written, there’s nothing here that’ll stick in the memory for longer than it takes to read it. What a dark time to be a Batman fan.
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