Batman: Dark Patterns #9 – Dan Watters, Writer; Hayden Sherman, Artist; Triona Farrell, Colorist
Ray – 9/10
Ray: The third case comes to an end this month, but this isn’t like the other ones. There’s no powerful supervilain like the twisted Wound Man from the first arc, and there isn’t any dramatic haunted setting like Scarface’s tower in the second. Instead, there’s simply the Rookery, the darkest corner of Gotham – where Batman found himself investigating a mysterious murder. A woman’s body, found in an industrial dryer and seemingly cooked to death. And as he got closer, he found ties to the infamous Red Hood Gang – only to be ambushed by the culprits, shot, and dragged before the mastermind. And that mastermind is…an old, wheelchair-bound man attached to an oxygen tank, and his two young grandsons. They want to bring back fear to the Rookery, make people think the Red Hood Gang is back and in charge of the criminal scene – and they can’t think of a better way to do it than killing Batman.
But not all is what it seems here. The old man, who pretends to be a powerful crime lord looking to hang on to power, is anything but. He’s pulling off an elaborate ruse, one that even the grandsons he’s turned into his henchmen believe. But Batman, a master of observation even at the beginning of his career, is quickly able to figure out his bluff – and that leads into a tragic chain of events that could come right out of Shakespeare’s most brutal tragedies. The art is excellent as always, but this arc didn’t quite have the visual strength of the first two, and its ending is unrelentingly bleak. But each arc seems to have a different lesson for Batman that he needs to learn at the very beginning of his career to be an effective crimefighter – and this one is that not every corner of Gotham can benefit from Batman. Looking forward to seeing what Watters and Sherman have planned for the last act.
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GeekDad received this comic for review purposes.
