Batman Dark Patterns is very good.
This might be a hot take but Batman is cooler when they write him as potentially having some mysticism instead of diet emo Tony Stark.
To be fair I don't want anyone to canonize that Bruce Wayne has magical powers, I love when they're like "well but it's just hysteria" "I was drugged" "a hallucination from the pain" or whatever. It needs to be vague and up in the air, it needs to be superstition. I think Dan Watter built this perfectly with the Pareidolia arc, by making Bruce ponder if the things that happen are just coincidences that we attribute patterns to or if they are really there and then have Bruce do a gesture that makes it look like he stopped the fire just to then say we might be reading too much into it, who knows. It's very well crafted and the art by Hayden Sherman is INSANE honestly.
I did have some problems with it tho but honestly those are more just personal preferences and nerd tantrum.
The first arc was not that interesting to me personally and Wound Man was not very convincing to me. Bruce keeps saying any hit on him will kill him but then he puts the guy to sleep and lets him fall to the ground? And he is laid down later and the pressure never does anything to the nails? Idk, it felt overdone.
I loved the scarface arc.
the third arc, Pareidolia, introduces some key concepts to the story that I enjoyed but it really bothered me in some aspects. Bruce being shot is fine but being tied up by an old man and two kids, just to have the kid die? It's in bad taste and makes him look kinda stupid. Not that he needs to be the most powerful man ever but it's not very convincing to me, at least not the way it happened. Also Bruce saw a man eat a rat said "okay" and went away and idk, I miss when he would just give jobs to criminals out of the blue and give people money or tips to get help. This was a great opportunity for him to come back later and give the guy some good food and a job or something, I feel like the whole thing with him going to a poor neighborhood and making everything worse is not bad per se but if it's not addressed in terms of class dynamics it just makes Batman look like those old facebook posts of like "if Batman REALLY wanted to help Gotham he would pay for schools" and like, yeah, that's what he does, all the time, but Dark Patterns doesn't help this point at all (and it's not it's job or it's point but it does frustrate me as a loser)
The end is too cool for me to hate but the villain is very weak to me. I already did not care for the suspicious doctor thing and then the journalist was just too obvious. It's a shame cause I do feel like the reimagining of the Ventriloquist was good and so did the old man in the third arc, but the last villain talks too much and never convinces me of why he's compelling. It's funny, but Garfield Lynns barely did anything and had more sauce the whole time, I almost wish the last arc was about him and his relation to fire instead... Even then, the last arc fed me well with Batman mysticism, I love when Bruce sees shit, be it ghosts or scenes of Gotham's past and the end gave me chills so I'm very satisfied, cause I feel like we lost a lot of Dennis O'neil vision of Batman as cryptid, the urban legend, the myth (obviously because of the nolanverse's irreparable damage to Batman) but I loved when back in the day the common folk of Gotham would debate if Batman existed and if so if he was a demon or a vampire or whatever. The superstition part of Batman is what fuels the fear part of Batman (Which is why I find stupid when people say like "we should see the actors eyes so we can relate to him, no white lenses!" NO! We shouldn't see his eyes, he built this whole thing EXACTLY so you don't think he's human. Humans die, criminals should not believe they can kill the Batman).
Honestly it's making me really happy to see Dan Watters bring back the urban fantasy aspects of Batman to both him and Nightwing and I also loved it in Ram V's Gotham Nocturne, the whole Barbatos thing is one of my favorite things in Batman mythos (well, the original one at least, by Peter Milligan, not the dark multiverse thing).
Batman Dark Patterns gets an 8.5/10 from me. Great Batman mysticism, great art but Could be woker and could have had a Robin.
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