A Batman villain is now an apartment building

Writer Dan Watters and artist Hayden Sherman’s Batman: Dark Patterns is a miniseries showcasing four spooky mysteries. Every three issues forms a new arc pitting a young Batman against some new weirdness in Gotham City. This week, to kick off the series’ second arc, the weirdness is thus: Mr. Scarface, of the villain duo Scarface and the Ventriloquist, became an apartment building.

In one issue, Watters and Sherman set up an homage to Gareth Evans’ lauded action movie The Raid: Redemption, as Batman steps in to rescue a police officer held hostage somewhere in Bledin Towers’ 215 apartments. Scarface’s disembodied voice rings from every wall, and his masked gang scrawls his visage on the facade. The mystery: Where, and who, is Scarface’s ventriloquist? It’s a bananas twist on an old, often overlooked villain, and a fabulous setup for action. This penultimate page reveal of Scarface’s plan was the cleverest thing I saw in comics this week.

My editor, Tasha, however, had some entirely reasonable questions, in the spirit of our dialogue explaining the mysteries of Venom: The Last Dance.

Tasha: Can we start with the “New gody, Gatman!” thing? Why can’t this, um, I guess evil building pronounce B’s?

Susana: Yeah… that’s a traditional comics characteristic of Scarface and the Ventriloquist. Scarface can’t pronounce B sounds, because ventriloquists aren’t supposed to move their lips during their arts. It’s a little silly for my tastes, but I suppose if I’m out here stanning for the “dresses like a bat” guy, I don’t have a leg to stand on.

Tasha: So it’s not because buildings have inflexible lips?

Susana: Correct. Most buildings don’t have lips at all.

Tasha: So I originally saw this panel out of context, which made it seem a lot weirder — reading the comic (and your note about this above) it’s clearer that Scarface’s latest acolytes drew that face on the building, and it didn’t just… manifest. But what do you think is going on here? Has there been a supernatural element to Scarface in the past, or do you think there’s just a guy with a megaphone hiding back there somewhere (and still not pronouncing his B’s even though no one’s watching him onstage)?

Susana: What might be surprising for folks who know about Scarface and the Ventriloquist from, say, Batman: The Animated Series is that it’s pretty common for comics writers to play around with the idea that Scarface might not be the violent alternate personality of ventriloquist Arnold Wesker, and their relationship could be a spooky haunted-doll-type situation. I think Watters and Sherman are definitely playing with that uncertainty here. In a world as strange as Batman’s, it wouldn’t be impossible for a building to be possessed by a malignant spirit.

But Watters and Sherman also establish earlier in the comic that the acoustics of Bledin Towers are really confusing, as in many ill-conceived concrete structures. Residents say sound bounces erratically through its hallways and stair shafts, making it difficult to tell where noises are coming from. It’s a situation where the Ventriloquist could very well be using an entire building to throw his voice.

Tasha: Am I reading this right visually? Did the inhabitants of this apartment building really shove a sofa halfway off a balcony to visually represent Scarface having a cigar?

Susana: YES. It rules. You see the couch in earlier panels, just sitting around like litter in the hallways. It’s a great detail.

Tasha: Was the previous Dark Matters arc this weird?

Susana: Oh, yes. It was about a serial killer called the Wounded Man, who could feel no pain but had embedded dozens of nails, pieces of rebar, and other sharp objects in his body, just close enough to his vital organs and arteries that it was nearly impossible to touch him — much less fight him or capture him — without killing him. Which, you know, Batman has a solemn oath against.

Tasha: The bigger picture this initial issue sets up is of a run-down housing project that’s about to be torn down and replaced with condos, and a group of abandoned and likely to be displaced residents who don’t want to leave. It feels like there’s going to be a significant class warfare arc to this story. Is that typical for Scarface? For this team or this series so far?

Susana: You’ve hit the nail on the head (of the Wounded Man). Just last issue, the Wounded Man’s powers and crimes turned out to stem from a Gotham suburb illegally built on top of a chemical dumping site that poisoned everyone who lived there. With this first issue of its second story, it really seems like long-term systemic abuse is the throughline Watters and Sherman are playing with — the way in which citizens of Gotham City are molded by the systems that make it such a hard place to live, not just the costumed serial killers.

And they turned Scarface into a building. I love it.

Issues 1-4 of Batman: Dark Patterns are out now, with issue 5 hitting on April 9.