The final issue draws everything together. Batman faces the Child of Fire, and stands prepared to save Gotham from the storm that he has brought. Batman: Dark Patterns #12 is written by Dan Watters, drawn by Hayden Sherman, colored by Triona Farrell and lettered by Frank Cvetkovic.
Will Nevin: And now, the end is near, and so we face the final curtain: Dan Watters and Hayden Sherman … my goodness. They did it their way for 12 incredible issues.
Matt Lazorwitz: I didn’t doubt that they could stick the landing, but there’s always that voice at the back of your head that wonders if you’re going to get a Long Halloween, with some swerve at the very end that taints the big picture. But nope, this ending is perfect to what this series has been.
Will: Ain’t no Gilda Dent in this book, buddy!
A History of Flames
Matt: I can’t wait to reread this series, Will. This last issue ties everything together into the eponymous dark pattern. I had completely forgotten that it was a fire that created the Wound Man. This whole thing was built so perfectly, and so subtly. I want to see if we see Nicky Harris headlines in those early issues, too! I bet there are a ton of little clues if you know what you’re looking for.
Will: That was the beautiful surprise of this series, wasn’t it? That we got four stories that were great on their own but came together in the end. And yes, I completely agree — this will be something to read in the trade. (Which, by the way, Watters has suggested folks do if we want to see more of this.) I guess this’ll be collected in two volumes, right?
Matt: I would expect two trades and one hardcover.
Honestly? DC doesn’t do many of them anymore, but I would shell out the bucks for one of those Absolute Editions, the oversized, slipcased ones with all the backmatter. This is a series that would absolutely do with an oversized reprint. You’d really be able to dig into the details on Sherman’s art.
Will: We can only hope! Hey, maybe this thing will be so popular in five years, it’ll be collected in the compact comic format, and we’ll all have a happy tear of sadness for the reduced detail. But in this here final issue, there’s so much to like, especially as Batman basically becomes a force of nature.
Matt: That page, that image? Batman holding his hand and seemingly stopping a wall of fire? That needs to go up there with old Batman riding the horse in Dark Knight Returns or Batman running across the beach in “The Joker’s Five Way Revenge” as one of the iconic Batman images.
Will: Literally took my breath away — one of the most moving images in recent Bat memory, right up there with Absolute Bats so deliciously breaking a Nazi’s arm. But it also called to mind a line from a great George Carlin routine about a raging inferno that swallows up the United States and eventually the world: “So the fire moves to Philadelphia but it’s a weekend and Philadelphia’s closed on the weekends. So the fire moves to New York City and the people of New York tell the fire to go fuck itself.”
Matt: Watters’ dialogue there, of the ever rational Batman saying it was hysteria, and Dr. Sereika talking about how fire works, all makes so much logical sense, but we’ve seen this book isn’t always so rational. Batman was sure there was no ghost in Scarface Tower, after all, but the text seems to give a lie to that. But not so much that we are drowning in the supernatural. It’s a great synthesis of what some of the best Batman stories are, straddling the line between the noir and the horrific.
Will: Readers are left to believe what they choose to believe, much like Dr. Sereika chooses to believe in spontaneous human combustion (which most assuredly is not a thing). I wonder if that’s a lie he chooses to tell himself to ease whatever guilt he may have about what happened at the body farm. If nothing else arises from Dark Patterns, I want to see more of him — he’s such a weird, interesting li’l guy.
Matt: We said it last issue, but I also want more of Watters writing Firefly. Maybe have him migrate to Bludhaven and show up in Nightwing. We didn’t get a lot of him, but I loved his little moments in this issue. He’s not the cackling madman he was portrayed as in the past, and that moment with Jim where he says he can let the fire decide Jim’s fate? Super creepy.
Will: If anyone is going to respect fire and (much like other natural disasters) its ability to lay waste to one thing and leave an adjacent thing untouched, it’s Firefly. And you get the sense with the postscript that he took what happened in this series personally.
Matt: Oh, you don’t do fire in Gotham and think you’re going to avoid retribution from Firefly. Ask Firebug, Gotham’s other arson villain. That guy sucked.
I feel like I’m dancing around a lot of the details of this issue, because I don’t want to spoil anything. If you’re reading the review of a comic that’s only been out for a couple days, I think the contract is that you’re going to get mild spoilers, but I want people to just let this wash over them. And I want more. I want Watters/Sherman to live in the same air as O’Neil/Adams, Loeb/Sale and Snyder/Capullo as a team who has a solid body of Batman work, not just one story like Miller/Mazzucchelli.
Will: Agreed. 100 percent. Here’s a hypothetical for you: Say someone at the unknowable mind of DC editorial called you and let you decide their next project. Rank these in order of preference: a 50-issue run on ‘Tec (where there might be fill-in artists and will definitely tie into some dumb event at some point), an oversized-format Black Label and/or Vertigo book, or a second volume of Dark Patterns.
Matt: Oh, that’s a challenge. I can say the longform run is probably bottom of the list. As much as I’d love to get that long a run, as you say, the vagaries of being involved in the DC universe could add some poison to the well. I would say Dark Patterns II would be second, because I feel like this is so perfect, and as we said about Long Halloween, each volume didn’t quite live up to the previous. So I think a four- or five-issue Black Label miniseries in that oversized, squarebound format would be the winner. It would give Sherman space to play with, and let Watters have longer issues. I know he gets done to death, but I would be really curious to see what they could do with Joker. I think a Sherman-drawn Joker would be the stuff of nightmares.
Will: Pants-shittingly scary. One of the nicest things about this series is what it doesn’t include: the J-man. We talk so often about writers getting their one shot and going straight to Joker, but Watters still has that in his back pocket. I think for sure he could pull it off.
Matt: I think that or another Azrael series with Sherman on art. All that trippy mindscape stuff, the St. Dumas hallucinations, but with Sherman doing the designs, would be wild. Watters has quietly built up a big resume of Bat titles, between this, Arkham City: Order of the World, Sword of Azrael and the backups during Ram V’s ‘Tec, not to mention his still-going run on Nightwing. Seems to me there’s a story that could draw a lot of those threads together into a grand tapestry.
Will: I think we’re in agreement on two points: 1) Any Bat fan does themselves a disservice if they choose not to read this series, and 2) it’s time for a call-up to the big leagues and main titles for these two.
(No offense to Nightwing.)
Bat-miscellany
- We talked about Dark Patterns, but there were five Bat books this week: Dark Patterns, Gotham By Gaslight, Batman and Robin, Batman/Static: Beyond, and the next part of “H2SH.” That’s a lot of Bat books in one week.
- Don’t forget Second Knight either. Sure, it might not be out “this week,” but time is an illusion anyway. — WN
- And speaking of Batman/Static: Beyond, this week’s BatChat podcast focuses on Terry McGinnis, Batman Beyond.
Buy Batman: Dark Patterns #12 here. (Disclaimer: As an Amazon Associate, ComicsXF may earn from qualifying purchases.)
Matt Lazorwitz read his first comic at the age of 5. It was Who's Who in the DC Universe #2, featuring characters whose names begin with B, which explains so much about his Batman obsession. He writes about comics he loves, and co-hosts the podcasts BatChat with Matt & Will and The ComicsXF Interview Podcast.
Will Nevin loves bourbon and AP style and gets paid to teach one of those things. He is on Twitter far too often.
